A surprise announcement to kick off the week has sent shockwaves through the Alexa Skill developer community - Amazon has initiated a revenue sharing program by which developers of game skills that meet certain criteria can be compensated based on how active their users were during a given month. This is a game-changing (pun 100% intended) addition, and it's sure to reshape the development landscape...

Amazon ​recently released a new feature that allows for beta testing skills. That's something we (and a lot of other developers) have been requesting for almost a year, and I'm sure we'll have plenty to say about it going forward. Today, though, we wanted to call out one cool side effect: it's now much easier to get ASK Responder configured to play with...

The Alexa team has been busy since our last post, with a series of announcements and changes that are sending waves across the development community. We wanted to take a minute to throw out some hot takes about what we've seen.

For months now, rumors have been swirling that Alexa could do a bit more (vocally) than Amazon was letting on. With the dev community actively looking for ways to enhance the skills they build, it was clear a day was coming where that feature would have to be opened up. Well, that day is today...

Word came from on-high today that the Amazon.LITERAL slot type has been granted its reprieve. In terms of functionality, this may not be a huge game changer, but it may be a landmark decision in terms of how Amazon works with its development community. We just want to say a few things about that...

We're starting to see scattered reports across a variety of global regions that there is a new wake word - "COMPUTER" - starting to roll out as devices get the newest firmware. For us here at 3PO-Labs this comes as no surprise, as we noted over a year ago - at the same time we predicted the "ECHO" wake word - that they had special logic for "COMPUTER" already built-in but not complete. This provides us an opportunity to dive back in and see if there's anything new to uncover. Read on for some more technical details, and a running list of the information we can collect...

Just a quick note that "Actions on Google", the Google Home equivalent to the Alexa Skills Kit, is now out of its closed beta. We'll have more to say about this later, after we've had an opportunity to look through the various content provided here: https://developers.google.com/actions/

In the meantime one of our frequent collaborators - Jo Jaquinta of TsaTsaTzu - has already dove head first into Actions with Google, and will be doing a webcast this evening, Friday, December 9 at 6PM PST. You can watch it on Youtube: ​http://youtube.com/jjaquinta/live