The Amazon Echo is a hit: customers rave about its hands-free utility (4.5 stars with 47k reviews), notable analysts like Mary Meeker ponder if its the next big thing (3M shipped by some estimates), and it has a burgeoning app ecosystem that grew ten-fold in six months (to 1,400 apps in June).

Amazon is investing in making Alexa more inviting to developers. Recently, they made app installation as easy as “Alexa, enable skill X”, upgraded the Skills store, and improved their already pretty good developer kit.

But they can do more. Today’s skills allow you to control devices, play games, access simple utilities, and even make rude noises [1]. But what if you could also connect with friends and family, use your Echo as a phone, or have it heckle you to get off the couch and go for a run?

After spending a couple of afternoons with my buddy Chuck investigating Alexa Skill ideas, I realized that we need more from the Alexa platform to be able to build a killer app. In this post I share my wish list, as well as thoughts on why these features don’t (yet) exist.

1. Notifications

Today, you must start every interaction with Alexa, it will (almost) never interrupt you [2]. That means that lots of highly desired features can’t be built, like: reading text messages as they arrive, alerting you of calendar events, telling you your Uber has arrived, motivating you to exercise/eat well/sleep, and so on.

Amazon has likely refrained from allowing notifications so as not to dethrone the proverbial mother-in-law as the biggest nag in the house. But not having them is a real drawback, and many have hypothesized on how they could be implemented without annoying users: throttling, strict app reviews, and user modifiable preferences. I’ll bet that Amazon’s working on making this happen, and when it hits, many new skills will appear.

Notifications for the Echo sound great, but without proper safeguards, we’ll all be subject to AI powered nagging.

2. Raw audio recording

There is no way to build an Alexa app that gets raw audio from the device. This is why there are no apps to record and replay voice memos, use your Alexa to make phone calls, or other clever ideas like an app that helps you practice public speaking by telling you how often you say filler words like “umm” (iPhone apps for speech practicing already exist).

Amazon probably wants to avoid major issues with privacy; like a situation where an app developer accidentally records your private conversations, and they leak out onto the internet. I could see Amazon creating a tightly controlled voice memo feature, maybe even phone integration, but I’m not sure they’ll open this up to developers out of fear of tarnishing Alexa’s name.

3. Communicate with other Alexa devices

Alexa is not a communication device. There is no way, for instance, for me to leave a daily status update for my family and friends, or to challenge friends to compete on games, or even a more public model where I can send alerts which people within a certain radius can subscribe to (e.g., an app for the neighborhood crime watch).

To be fair, there are workarounds: you can have users login to your own system (like you do for the Uber skill), and then use your system’s own friend network to route messages. But this is cumbersome, and requires each developer to create their own silos of Alexa users.

If Amazon were to provide the the ability to setup a user identity, with some way to vocally reference it, and a way to add friends, I think lots of highly sticky social use cases would begin to appear. Furthermore, invitations would allow for virality, and apps that create strong incentives to invite others, may explode in popularity.

4. Publicly accessible Alexa skills store with paid apps

The Alexa store is only accessible if you own an Alexa device, and are logged into Amazon. There is no official publicly accessible Alexa store on the web, which is why several unofficial web stores are flourishing to fill the void.

This may not seem like a big deal, but developers should be irked. Why? Without a public online Alexa store, you lose some opportunities to market your app. If your skill is popular and talked about on the web (like this list of 40 Alexa skills on Gizmodo), you’ll want a canonical home for it that everyone can link to, so that when people Google for, e.g., “Echo trivia game”, yours is the first hit. It also helps early adopters and enthusiasts discover new skills, like in this Reddit thread.

There also isn’t a way to charge for your app, and this may be holding back some developers who may otherwise expend serious effort towards building useful skills. My guess is that both of these features are somewhere on the Alexa team’s roadmap, but haven’t bubbled up the priority list quite yet.

5. Make custom phrases more accurate

Suppose you want to create an app for doctors where they can say “Alexa, get the stats for patient X’”. How does Alexa recognize the patient name X from a long list of possible names?

Amazon’s answer to this is “custom slots”, the ability for developers to list up to 50,000 possibilities that Alexa will use as strong hits to decipher the name. The problem is that this list is static, it can’t be changed dynamically by user or session. This is fine if you’re building, say, a horoscope app where the list of custom phrases is fixed (Capricorn, Aries, Pisces, etc.), but in my example, it would greatly improve accuracy if Alexa knew to search only for valid names within the given doctor’s patient list (or even just the patients they plan on seeing today).

Not knowing Alexa’s architecture, I can’t comment on how hard it would be for Amazon to provide an API to modify custom phrases on the fly per user (or even session), but I know it would strengthen accuracy, and open up doors for more complex interactions.

In Conclusion

I think there are opportunities to build large audiences with Alexa skills, and to monetize them by driving them towards your own services. But the platform needs more maturity before we see Alexa’s first killer app. Entrepreneurs should pay close attention to Alexa’s developer updates; my money says Amazon is likely to make some of these changes in the coming months, and open up lots of great opportunities.

Notes