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.
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...
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...
When Amazon added the feature a month ago to filter on just your enabled skills, we predicted (based on the design of that feature) that there would be additional filters coming soon. Specifically, we guessed that they'd add the ability to filter by skill category. It seems we hit the nail on the head, because with the new feature things now look like this:
This check box allows you to view only skills in the given category. You may recall that last week Amazon announced a major shift on how smart home stuff is handled, switching from the Lighting API to new Smart Home Skills (announcement here). The stated expectation is that Smart Home Skills will start showing up by the end of April. At the moment, however, none are certified yet, which means if you check that box you'll get an empty result set:
Guess my home will just have to stay stupid for now...
This is likely the reason that Amazon disabled the feature immediately after rolling it out. It doesn't make a ton of sense to show your users a feature that doesn't benefit them at all. If you dig into the underlying javascript, though, you'll notice that the mechanism to do the filtering is still there.
This change also solves a mystery that we've been facing for a while. For as long as I've been aware, the JSON representation of a skill has had this "skillTypes" field that was unused. It seems Smart Home Skills will be the first to make use of the feature.
It's worth noting, however, that this field is a String array, which means we can expect that in the future a single skill might have multiple skill types. The idea would obviously be that you could then filter on any of those skill types, which would be very helpful in navigating the ever expanding list of skills.
We'll keep our eyes open for any new changes on this front.
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