Continuing to work through the backlog. To use any of these skills, go to the "skills" tab of your companion app.

Superpower!

Superpower Lab, LLC

With Superpower, you can get an interesting conversation topic to start an engaging discussion with your friends and family. We are constantly adding exciting new topics to help you liven up your dinner parties and family gatherings.

A "fortune cookie" skill with a little bit of variety.

Ease of Use: 3 out of 5. Most fortune cookie skills have a minimal interface. This, however, is two fortune cookies in one. It does both "conversation starters" and also "parenting tips". I like that it does more than one thing, but the rather verbose start up message gets old fast.

Usefulness: 3 out of 5. I expected this to be extraordinary lame. It is, in fact, only mildly lame. The conversation starters and parenting tips were... not bad. The parenting tips weren't really parenting tips, but more conversation starters for you with your kids. Also, one or two conversation starters might have been better classified as parenting tips.

Novelty: 3 out of 5. Fortune cookies are the most frequent skill type to be found on Alexa (shortly followed by Bitcoins and cats). However, being taking the bold step of combining two, it's a little better than most.

Overall: 3 out of 5. I may leave this enabled for a few days. Show it to the kids, and see what they think. Probably not much beyond that. If the skill was a little better articulated, it might have the potential to grow and serve up a wider variety of topics. But it has the feeling of having been quickly thrown together. I'm not sure the developer is all that committed. Even their privacy policy/terms of use site has expired!

Quote Me

Mike Waldrop

We have over 75,000 quotes covering a range of over 100 different topics from over 11,000 people such as Sophocles, Bill Gates, Walt Whitman and many others. You can ask for a random quote from the entire library or a quote on a specific topic such as love, happiness, or humor. A full list of topics can be sent to your Alexa app at any time.

A "fortune cookie" skill with a lot of variety.

Ease of Use: 3 out of 5. This fortune cookie has grand ambitions. It weaves together a whole bunch of topics that it can provide quotes from. Unfortunately the audio interface is rather clumsy and not well thought through. This leads to irritating sequences like:

Alexa: "Please say 'yes' or 'no'.

Me: Yes

Alexa: "Yes is not a valid input at this point".

Usefulness: 2 out of 5. Although the breadth of quotes is impressive, number wise, it suffers in execution. It is hard to be inspiring in the halting unnatural speech that you get when Alexa reads untailored prose. Quotes are like poetry. To fully get their meaning across, they need pauses at the right points. No editing has been done of these. Someone just took them off the internet, and has Alexa spit them out. In this case quantity does not make up for quality.

Novelty: 3 out of 5. I'm really tired of "inspiration quote" skill. Really tired of them. But I have to give kudos to Mike Waldrop for having a topic based one. I've often thought if I ever do a fortune cookie skill that I'd do a multi-plexed mash-up skill. And this is probably would it would look like. Well, maybe with a smoother interface.

Overall: 3 out of 5. This has grand ambitions, and could have been really good. But the interface and diction bring it down to mid level.

Shower Thoughts by BugBen.com

Shower Thoughts are itty-bitty witty bite-sized clever thoughts. This is a skill which will automatically fetch the Internet's most popular Shower Thought each day.

Yet another "fortune cookie" skill. Maybe I should make an acronym: YAFCS. This just pulls from reddit's /r/ShowerThoughts.

Ease of Use: 3 out of 5. It's a trivial one shot invocation.

Usefulness: 2 out of 5. I'm not quite sure how they work out the "most popular" thought. But they really do just one a day. Although the one for today was pretty funny, it would only give me the same one, over and over. I guess I have to wait until tomorrow to get another one.

Novelty: 1 out of 5. There are dozens of skills that do exactly this. Now, if it had been more general, or could connect to any given reddit, that would have been something.

Overall: 1 out of 5. It's all very nice that Amazon is now publishing every single approved skill. But the interface isn't up to it. Especially since there isn't a "never show me this skill again" button.