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...
Right off the bat, there are some obvious takeaways. We should expect the quality of some existing skills to start going up as developers now have a direct incentive to build "sticky" games. We'll see more game skills published as a percentage of overall skills. And we will almost certainly start seeing broader advertising of Alexa skills, as there's a calculable and attainable ROI for doing so.
As usual, though, we'll let others deal with the surface-level analysis. We at 3PO-Labs are interested in diving a little bit deeper, especially with regard to the long-term play Amazon is making here. Here's a few ideas we had about why Amazon might be doing this...
As usual, though, we'll let others deal with the surface-level analysis. We at 3PO-Labs are interested in diving a little bit deeper, especially with regard to the long-term play Amazon is making here. Here's a few ideas we had about why Amazon might be doing this...
"Putting a wall around the state"
In college sports, there is an often used analogy around recruiting at big state schools, which is that coaches need to "build a wall around the state". Essentially, it's a cutesy way of saying it's important to lock down the local, homegrown talent and keep them local. It's possible that Amazon sees themselves in a similar situation - they have a massive lead in the size of their developer base, but they're now beset on all sides by other companies wanting a piece of the voice-assistant pie. By adding revenue sharing, in one fell swoop Amazon wipes out one of the primary complaints of its independent, home-grown developers:
 | In what has become something of a rallying cry for the Alexa dev community, the "Snowcone Dilemma" is a shorthand way of describing the lack of monetization options on the platform. The idea goes, essentially, "Why would I invest time in building quality Alexa skills when I can make more money selling snow cones?". For one segment of skill devs, at least, Amazon may have just melted the Snowcone Dilemma. |
By addressing the Snowcone Dilemma, Amazon more-or-less buys themselves a degree of loyalty and goodwill - essentially "putting a wall around" the developer community. The idea here probably isn't to keep developers from developing for other platforms; rather, it serves to make sure Alexa is included in any cross-platform development, and makes them more likely to get skill releases and updates first. As the video game console wars have shown, a timed exclusive can be almost as valuable as a completely exclusive release.
That said, we think there's probably more to this play than just gobbling up content (and content creators). We see this as an indirect investment in the quality of the platform...
If "data is king", games must be the royal family
As people have started to dig into how this payment system works, one thing that's caught the eye of a lot of folks is that level of ongoing user engagement is one of the primary factors in deciding payout. As April Hamilton of LoveMyEcho astutely noted, this is going to drive a lot more developers to build long-form, multi-turn skills, which is great for Alexa.
Amazon regularly touts Alexa as a system that is "always learning" or "constantly improving". It does that with data. Lots and lots of data. The more times people repeat phrases, the better Alexa's models get. If this change facilitates even a 1% increase in daily engagement with third party skills by existing skill users, that's a lot of data - millions or billions of extra utterances per year, feeding right into Alexa's brain.
There's a good chance that this new data is statistically more valuable, as well. While it's great to have thousands of people say "Alexa, open One Bus Away" every single day, there's certainly an aspect of diminishing returns with such a constrained set of utterances. Games, on the other hand, are likely to have very broad intent models that can take all kinds of distinct and interesting input (proper nouns, emotionally-charged speech, etc), which makes this data more valuable in many ways.
Amazon regularly touts Alexa as a system that is "always learning" or "constantly improving". It does that with data. Lots and lots of data. The more times people repeat phrases, the better Alexa's models get. If this change facilitates even a 1% increase in daily engagement with third party skills by existing skill users, that's a lot of data - millions or billions of extra utterances per year, feeding right into Alexa's brain.
There's a good chance that this new data is statistically more valuable, as well. While it's great to have thousands of people say "Alexa, open One Bus Away" every single day, there's certainly an aspect of diminishing returns with such a constrained set of utterances. Games, on the other hand, are likely to have very broad intent models that can take all kinds of distinct and interesting input (proper nouns, emotionally-charged speech, etc), which makes this data more valuable in many ways.
A secondary boon from long-form interactions
If training the model is the direct benefit of more active user engagement, training the UX is the indirect benefit. With the release of the APIs around the Alexa Dialog Model that came with the Skill Builder beta, Amazon has shown they are interested in enabling and supporting multi-turn dialog to a greater degree. (Interestingly, this appears to be a bit of a pivot from the early days of the platform, where certification was regularly trying to push the idea of one-shot invocations being superior in nature and preferable to active sessions)
The thing is, Alexa and the other voice assistants are still existing in a nascent environment when it comes to user experience for voice. We are starting to see some best practices emerge, but it's not entirely clear yet what form skeumorphism, affordances, and other visual UX concepts might take in a voice-first world (or if they should even exist at all). With a proliferation of game skills and the accompanying move towards increased quality, Amazon can treat the game ecosystem as a giant experiment in voice UX, essentially comparing skills in an almost apples-to-apples or A/B test to see what users like and what they don't.
Speaking of which...
The thing is, Alexa and the other voice assistants are still existing in a nascent environment when it comes to user experience for voice. We are starting to see some best practices emerge, but it's not entirely clear yet what form skeumorphism, affordances, and other visual UX concepts might take in a voice-first world (or if they should even exist at all). With a proliferation of game skills and the accompanying move towards increased quality, Amazon can treat the game ecosystem as a giant experiment in voice UX, essentially comparing skills in an almost apples-to-apples or A/B test to see what users like and what they don't.
Speaking of which...
Quid pro quo
In theory, the training is a two-way street. High-quality, well-tested skills are going to help Amazon learn, but there's an argument to be made that high-quality, sticky skills that users are deeply engaged in are going to teach users how to better use the platform as well, without Amazon having to lift a finger.
Take the idea of prompts during an open session - which is notorious to skill developers as "Checklist item 4.1". Many of us in the development community believe that ending every Alexa speech with a question or prompt is a huge mistake in terms of the experience for our customers. For most users it is readily apparent when Alexa is still active and whether or not you're expected or able to add input of your own. Amazon, however, seems to be optimizing certification for the least savvy set of users - those who may actually require a prompt every single time. Many of these users probably aren't interested in actively engaging in a training program to be better users of the platform, but if those users could be passively trained through rote repetition by the games they enjoy, it would be a boon to all of us.
Likewise, there are many features that even expert users likely take for granted - the ability to ask for help, for example. Further, there are sure to be more advanced features added later (either platform-wide, or by skill devs) that will require training even for those already familiar with the platform. Games provide a perfect avenue for user training.
There's an auxiliary benefit for users here too, which is that longer engagement with a single skill means less skill hopping, ergo less skill names to remember. Skill name fatigue is a very real consumer complaint, and until Amazon solves top-level invocations it's something they'll need to work around. Depending on how they've optimized the payouts, it may be the case that we see skill developers migrate away from individual micro-skills, and towards composite macro-skills. An example here might be a "3PO Card Table" skill replacing both "3PO Blackjack" and "3PO Hold'em". Amazon has the ability to influence this ever so slightly with their payouts.
Take the idea of prompts during an open session - which is notorious to skill developers as "Checklist item 4.1". Many of us in the development community believe that ending every Alexa speech with a question or prompt is a huge mistake in terms of the experience for our customers. For most users it is readily apparent when Alexa is still active and whether or not you're expected or able to add input of your own. Amazon, however, seems to be optimizing certification for the least savvy set of users - those who may actually require a prompt every single time. Many of these users probably aren't interested in actively engaging in a training program to be better users of the platform, but if those users could be passively trained through rote repetition by the games they enjoy, it would be a boon to all of us.
Likewise, there are many features that even expert users likely take for granted - the ability to ask for help, for example. Further, there are sure to be more advanced features added later (either platform-wide, or by skill devs) that will require training even for those already familiar with the platform. Games provide a perfect avenue for user training.
There's an auxiliary benefit for users here too, which is that longer engagement with a single skill means less skill hopping, ergo less skill names to remember. Skill name fatigue is a very real consumer complaint, and until Amazon solves top-level invocations it's something they'll need to work around. Depending on how they've optimized the payouts, it may be the case that we see skill developers migrate away from individual micro-skills, and towards composite macro-skills. An example here might be a "3PO Card Table" skill replacing both "3PO Blackjack" and "3PO Hold'em". Amazon has the ability to influence this ever so slightly with their payouts.
Throwing a bone to the guys behind the scenes
Finally, this is getting real deep into the metagame, but bringing monetization into things is a winning strategy in terms of refocusing the folks who build tools and utilities for your platform. With a focus on quality comes a need for tools that can help build and test high-quality games. When there's a clear metrics-driven payday, developers are obviously going to be interested in analytics.
This is an obvious windfall for folks like VoiceLabs, but we at 3PO-Labs expect even our humble utilities (ASKResponder and our as-yet-unreleased-and-super-secret tool) to see renewed interest.
This is an obvious windfall for folks like VoiceLabs, but we at 3PO-Labs expect even our humble utilities (ASKResponder and our as-yet-unreleased-and-super-secret tool) to see renewed interest.
It's exciting times for the platform, and we at 3PO-Labs are super interested to see how this plays out. Lets us know if you think we missed anything in our deep read of this move!
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