The first time we invoke the skill, Alexa responds with "the requested skill took too long to respond." On the succeeding tries, it responds with our Skill's greeting. Even if we tried to hit our web service first from the browser to "wake" it up, and then use Echo to open the skill, Alexa still responds with the same message on the first try.
Any suggestions on how we can solve this issue?
Sounds like you are on the right track. You've got some initialization overload. My skills have some setup to do, so my CI/CD script always pings them to make sure they have completed initialization before marking them on-line.
Instrument your code. Put in logging so you know what is happening when. Compare the code path when called from Alexa to when you ping it from the web. That will help you narrow down why your ping isn't solving the problem.
A lot is going to depend on how and where you are hosting your skill. Lambda is different from Elastic Beanstalk, and one language is different from another. I can't help you more without more information. All I can say is that is, likely, isn't on the Alexa side.
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