Two Voice Devs

Things change, sure, but what happens when the platform you've developed for deprecates and removes a feature you were using? How do you adjust? Allen and Mark discuss the impending removal of Alexa Display Templates and other technologies on Alexa and the Google Assistant that have changed over the years.

Our 50th episode! Amazing! Thank you everyone who has been part of this along the way. We figured this would be a golden opportunity to launch an Action, which we've now done. Mark and Allen chat about what inspired "Talk to Two Voice Devs", how it is more interactive than a typical podcast, how some of it works, and how this is just the first step. What would you like to talk with a podcast about...

You've designed the conversations, you've written the code, everything is tested. You can release your skill or action now publicly, right? Well, not quite yet. First you have to get past the review and certification teams at Amazon and Google. Mark and Allen discuss this final step in the development process and what it means for you. Do you have any good tales about the process? Any nightmare st...

This week, Roger Kibbe guest hosts, along with Mark, to discuss what he does as a Developer Evangelist for Samsung's Bixby, how Bixby is different, what he does with the Open Voice Network, and his take on the voice industry in general.

Experience helps you to not make mistakes. But how do you get experience? By making mistakes. And between Mark and Allen, they've made plenty of mistakes in years of programming. They'll talk about some of the lessons they've learned along the way, particularly for voice. What lessons have you learned that you want to share?

Eventually you're going to want to monetize your Google action and one way to do that is through in-Action transactions. Mark and Allen go over the different kinds of Digital Goods Transactions available and how to use them. (If you're looking for how to do this on Alexa - check out the previous episode.)    For more about digital goods transactions, see https://developers.google.co...

Eventually you're going to want to monetize your Alexa skill, and one way to do that is through In Skill Purchases (ISP). Mark and Allen go over the different kinds of ISPs available and how to use them. (If you're looking for how to do this on the Google Assistant - tune in next week.)   For more about In Skill Purchases, see https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/in-skill-purchase/is...

Now that Google I/O has been completed, Allen and Mark discuss what new features have been delivered for the Google Assistant... and what has just been promised. What were your favorite moments from Google I/O, and what new features are you most looking forward to?

This week is Google I/O, where Google regularly takes the opportunity to release what's new and coming "soon" in the Google ecosystem. Mark and Allen take the opportunity to review what new features have recently come out for developers of Alexa skills and actions for the Google Assistant. What new features of these platforms have you been building for?

In episode 38, we talked about the general process about handling users when they start our skill or action. But what do we do in the specific case of the new user? How can we onboard them? Allen and Mark talk about what our conversation designers may be asking of us, and the data structures and tools we can use to implement their ideas.

Do your skills or actions work on the first try? Of course they don't! That's why we have to find good methods of tracking down and squishing those bugs. Mark and Allen discuss some of their tips for figuring out what is wrong when, on those rare occasions, things don't quite work as expected.

In a lot of ways, #VoiceFirst development is like any other programming. But not quite. There are always some good things we need to remember as we build and test our skills, actions, and capsules. Mark and Allen talk about the best practices they follow when starting a project. Do you have any tips and tricks you make sure you follow to make your development life easier?

We've gotten a number of questions about developers from other fields getting started in voice. What do Ilarna and Allen think about that? Can it be done? You bet! Let's learn more.

Make sure you get your conversation off to a good start with a good welcome message. While you'll rely on your conversation designer to make it sound right, Mark and Allen discuss how to implement all different sorts of welcome messages, and why you may need different approaches at different times.

Keeping count of things, how often a user has asked for help or visited your skill/action, can be a useful tool conversation designers want. But how can you code that? And how do you report that value when you're talking to a user? Allen and Mark discuss several tips and tricks about how they keep track of counters using Jovo, multivocal, and other toolkits, and the best ways to present this infor...

Implementing "repeat" is one of the Intents that the review teams from both Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant require. But they don't really give guidance about how to design or implement that Intent. Mark and Allen discuss the various approaches that they take with the Alexa Skills Kit, Assistant Library, Jovo, and multivocal.

Did you notice that Mark was nominated for a Project Voice award for game development? To celebrate, we chatted about the tools he used to create his games and what kinds of things you can do to make a good voice-first game.

We complete (for now!) our review of display technologies for voice. Mark dove into a project using Vue and Web API for Games for Alexa, and he compares his experiences with Allen's recent presentation about using the Interactive Canvas for Actions on Google with React. Buzzword Bingo! How do the two compare and contrast?   Mark's project with Vue and Web API for Games: https://github.com/rmt...

Allen has some questions about the Alexa Presentation Language (APL), so who better to ask than one of the contributors to apl.ninja, Stuart Pockington, who joins as the guest host this week. We go through a lot of details about APL, some of which blows Allen's mind. Stuart adds this clarifying note: "For one question Allen asked about importing the APL document, I answered in a way that implies t...

What kind of built-in Intents do Alexa and the Google Assistant provide to developers directly? How do they differ from each other, and what kind of problems do they cause? And what are Events and how do they differ? Allen and Mark dive into this weeks tongue twister, (but don't worry, it doesn't get too intense).

Five to seven seconds. That's how long you have for your Alexa Skill or Google Assistant Action to reply to a request from the user. And while that doesn't seem very long, if you're waiting for a reply, it can seem like forever. Mark and Allen discuss how important it is to shave milliseconds off your processing, and various techniques to do so.

We received a question from Rebecca Evanhoe asking if there was a way to determine the features of our assistant device for a conversation. Mark and Allen dive into the various ways we can figure that out, and some of the "gotchas" that can come with it.

Following on from our previous episode about debugging, Allen and Mark discuss the related topics of analytics. Although there are tools from Alexa and Google, there are also some third party tools such as those from Dashbot, and the new Jovo Inbox. Along the way, we discuss potential performance pitfalls, and how to avoid a sonic Blue Screen of Death.

Debugging is the bane of most developers, but it can be particularly tricky when it comes to voice - between the remote nature of it and the rapid response time required, it can be difficult to capture what is going wrong. Mark and Allen discuss the various tools and tips we have at our disposal to track down those pesky bugs.   Some tools mentioned:  Bespoken - bespoken.io  Sentry...

For our first guest host, we're thrilled to welcome Ilarna Nche! She chats with Allen about how she got started developing with voice, some of her insights about what it takes to create a successful voice game, and what we should be thinking about next.