Amazon: 'Alexa, how do you fix shoddy APIs that keep breaking apps? Asking, er, for a friend'

Developers trying to integrate their applications with the Amazon Echo have suffered headache after headache for the past week, thanks to mystery problems with Alexa APIs. For several days now, third-party apps have been unable to use Amazon's Skills Kit as expected, and thus are unable to receive voice commands via Alexa …

[jake]

So basically, the folks developing the skills kit ...

... are without skills themselves?

Physician, heal thyself.

[James Delaney]

How do you fix shoddy APIs that keep breaking apps?

You just fix shoddy APIs that keep breaking apps.

[wikkity]

"unless they submit their skill to a full manual test run each day"

Which for anything that your income or reputation depends on you would do. Anyone who sits there smug that it worked when released and waits for users to report problems is asking for trouble. And not just once a day.

[Dan 55]

Re: "unless they submit their skill to a full manual test run each day"

Do you really like fucking about experimenting for hours on end instead of getting work done when the manufacturer already knows the answer and should just give you a changelog or new instructions as a matter of course.

I mean, send them an e-mail with three bullet pointed questions and they manage to answer none of them. Not speaking from experience in the past hour at all. Oh no.

[Chris Wicks 1]

Re: "unless they submit their skill to a full manual test run each day"

I actually think this is a fair statement. You put heartbeats and alerts on the external APIs that you use. You probably own an Echo which you use for testing anyway. You may want to consider recording a series of statements and playing them into your test Echo daily and checking that you get the right responses back (or can see in your own system that the requests got to you).

[wikkity]

Re: "unless they submit their skill to a full manual test run each day"

Wow, 6 thumbs down [and counting]. Does this mean no one out there checks their software when it's deployed? Some of the projects I maintain use dozens of partner and third party API's and provide many APIs used by others. By not having automated and manual checks to ensure the system is 100% ok we'd have clients wanting to know why we we were caught with our pants down and some of those outages would be likely to be mentioned in a article on here.

Sure it's naff when a dependency is offline or changes but that is life and you need to be as proactive as possible. But someone complaining that this is something they shouldn't have to do staggers belief, even if you have an arranged level of service things can go wrong. Testing and health checks are essential if you want to be able to react BEFORE the pressure is on.

[jake]

Re: "unless they submit their skill to a full manual test run each day"

"Some of the projects I maintain use dozens of partner and third party API's"

I think I've found the problem ...

[wikkity]

Re: I think I've found the problem ...

How many enterprise systems do you know that are self contained?

Maybe you are lucky you are to have a problem domain that does not need to interact the outside world. Possibly you work for a company that does it's own weather forecasting, banking facilities and handles currency conversion, provides it's own banking facilities, can plot travel routes taking into account current traffic conditions, checking stock levels at customer and distributor sites (all using different APIs), checking for fraud patterns, ...

[davlad]

Re: "unless they submit their skill to a full manual test run each day"

This bug means that Echo is not sending your app input where it was before.

I would compare it to having an iOS or Android app that requires input from the OS's keyboard, and suddenly the keyboard isn't working anymore.

If you are saying that developers need to check their skills for such a problem every day, that would be the equivalent of mobile developers having to test any feature of the mobile OS on which they require.

When Apple or Android releases new features, at least they are communicating about it. In this case Amazon is changing the behavior of the Echo without any communication. Its a stretch to blame this on the developers.

[breakfast]

Difficult to read

For some reason my break read "Skills Kit" as "Shills Kit" right through the article. Until I noticed my mistake I assumed it was an unusually frank piece of naming.