Our last two posts - about our screwup and about Holocron - have been fairly fun and lighthearted. Aside from the wordplay in the title, this is not one of those posts. Amazon has begun down a path, and we need to talk about why this is a really, really bad move for the platform and for us as developers...

Currently Alexa only recognizes English words. Amazon is just now starting to roll out support for other languages, with German up first. But, what if you want it to match words that aren't words?! That's crazy you say? Or is it?!! We encountered this problem, and this post is going to explain how we approached and solved it.

So, usually we use this blog to do things that are essentially self-promoting. "Look at all the sweet things we build", "Here's an idea to make Alexa better", "We discovered a hidden feature", etc. This is not one of those posts. This one is where we air some dirty laundry, which in turn exposes some issues with the platform as a whole...