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There can be a lot to keep in mind when trying to certify your Alexa skill. To assist you with this process, below is a list of common certification failure scenarios based on the latest trends. The scenarios have been further bifurcated into two categories: Easy Fix Failures and Common Certification Failures, and articles from our Alexa Skills Kit Knowledge Base containing details on how to fix them have been included for each. We will be continuously updating this page to match with the latest trends.

Easy Fix Failures:

1. Example Phrases and Launch Requests - Example phrases should be structured properly and contain supported launch words (like “ask”) and connecting words (like “to”).
2. Adequate Customer-Facing Information - Customer-facing information should describe the core functionality of your skill, and should include launch phrases that can be used, examples of how and why your skill is used, and possible answers to common questions about your skills functionality.
3. Valid Testing Credentials for Account Linking - Account linking enables your skill to connect the skill user's Amazon identity with their identity in a different system. With this feature, test credentials are required to be added to your skill's testing instructions to allow the certification team to test the full functionality of your skill.
4. Relevancy of Skill’s Description - Your skill’s description should contain complete sentences with proper grammar and structure, be relevant to the core functionality of your skill, and should not misrepresent your skill.
5. Contextualized TTS or Audio Playback Response - In order to create a good customer experience, you should test your skill to ensure that the example phrases are working correctly and are error free.

Common certification failures:

1. Example Phrases for Skill’s Invocation - Customers are most likely to try these example phrases the first time they interact with the skill. Therefore, making sure that they work well and that they provide a good user experience is important.
2. Good User Experience for Example Phrases - All your chosen example phrases must provide an accurate and working user experience.
3. Structuring Example Phrases To Include Your Sample Utterances - When creating example phrases, you want to ensure that you structure them precisely in order to show customers exactly what they can say to invoke your skill with a specific intent. As part of this, you should include sample utterances taken directly from your skill’s intents.
4. Language in Skill’s Metadata - Metadata is important for all types of skills since it informs your customers about the details of your skill and how they can use it to enhance their Alexa experience. If your skill model has multiple language locales, you should make sure the metadata of each locale is in the same language as the locale.
5. Adequate Intent’s Response - For a greater customer experience, you should test all of the sample utterances of each intent mentioned in your skill and ensure that the skill’s response is relevant and does not contain an error.
6. Acronyms Within Your Skill - When creating your Alexa skill, it’s important that you represent all acronyms correctly. This applies not only to your invocation name, but also to the rest of your skill’s interaction model.
7. Details on Session Management - Every response sent from your skill's back-end should include a shouldEndSession key-value pair. Acceptable values are either true or false.
8. Utilizing Built-In AMAZON Intents and Slot Types - The Alexa Skills Kit includes a large library of built-in intents you can use instead of creating your own. You should utilize these intents wherever possible.
9. Contractions and Possessive Nouns - To help improve the natural language understanding (NLU) accuracy of your Alexa skill, it’s important to represent words in your interaction model correctly. One very easy mistake to make is to leave out apostrophes for contractions (such as they’ve, what’s, etc.) and possessive nouns (such as Sally’s, Victor’s, etc.).

We hope that these articles will help you with your skills certification. Happy skill building!