We here at 3PO-Labs are very curious folk. It's our drive to reverse engineer and deconstruct that initially pushed us to build Responder, so we could poke and prod at the system. This same nature is what led us down the path of discovering the third wake word a few months before it was released. In that same vein, today we want to talk about another secret (but admittedly limited) aspect of the platform that we believe has not previously been discovered...

Author's note: When I started writing this post, the feature was live (if not useful).  It looks like they might have mistakenly released it early, as it has since been pulled. The underlying source JS remains, though.
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​I was poking around on alexa.amazon.com last night and noticed a new feature pop-up.  It's a minor change - right now confined to just SmartHome skills that don't even exist yet - but it's something users have been requesting for quite a while.  Read on for more...

Amazon has rolled out a new UI for the Alexa website. The new design has merged similar links together. As a result the entire page feels slimmed down and less cluttered.

Read on to see what's changed...

Super quick post today, just calling out a change that a lot of people had been asking for on Reddit and on the developer forums.  We finally have the ability to click a check box in the companion app to show only the skills you currently have enabled.  Screenshots after the break.

We at DERP Group have had plenty to say about the problems with Amazon's current system of reviews for Alexa Skills, the effect this has for developers, and some of the shady practices surrounding skill reviews currently.  In this post we're specifically concerned with the way the Average Rating sort option in the Alexa companion apps (and alexa.amazon.com) does not effectively bubble the best skills to the top.  For a change of pace, though, instead of just calling out the problem, we figured we'd try proposing a solution as well.  Click through to read more...