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...

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...

It turns out, there are hidden "wake words" that Amazon have not publicly admitted to. This post will describe how to experimentally discover them and enable them.