It was around late November of 2015 when my original collaborator on CompliBot and InsultiBot and I started preparing our initial submission for certification. Last week, I submitted these same two skills again with a fun new feature I've been messing around with privately for a while. As you might've guessed, owing to the fact that I'm writing about it, it did not go well...

It's a little out of the ordinary for the content we post here, but one of the things that we at 3PO-Labs (and specifically Eric) find ourselves doing with some frequency is advocating on behalf of other developers who end up in situations they don't know how to resolve. Often this happens during the certification step, where a first rejection can seem like an insurmountable obstacle, especially for folks who are less familiar with how things work behind the scenes than we are. We recently took some time to argue on behalf of a few folks, and I wanted to share what that looks like a bit more broadly...

As mentioned in our previous post, we've had the opportunity to play around with the new Alexa push notifications feature for some time now. While the exact implementation details on the Alexa Skills Kit side are still not public (and therefore not something we can talk about yet until the public beta goes live), there are enough consumer-facing pieces that we CAN talk about that should be of interest to folks starting to think about their push notification use cases.

So, some exciting news from Amazon today - the first batch of skills with push notifications enabled from the private beta have finally been released. Unfortunately, in their official post Amazon called out several skills as exemplars of the new feature, but failed to mention that we at 3PO-Labs were also in the beta, and also have a live skill with notifications: AstroBot. In fact, due to a clerical error with certification a couple months ago, we were actually the very first third-party skill to go live with notifications. We've been incognito ever since, but we're relieved to finally be able to talk about what we've done...

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.

There's been a lot of talk in the Alexa dev community lately about all of the tutorial or template based skills that are flooding the market (and of course the related discoverability concerns). All these "build a skill in under an hour" type walkthroughs are great for bringing new devs into the fold, but it got us thinking about what it really takes for an experienced Alexa developer to build something well. The question we came to was "could one of us build a skill from nothing to submission in just one day?". To answer the question, I decided to try it out, all the while cataloging the journey. Read on for more...

We've been heads down working on DERP's Next Big Thing™ (almost there!), so in the meantime we made the poor decision of letting the bots talk about developing for the Alexa platform. All that after the break...

After a couple months of experimenting, infrastructure building, implementing, submitting for certification, and re-implementing (and re-implementing... and re-implementing!), we're unbelievably pumped to announce that our first two skills have finally been published!  With no further ado, please meet...