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question

Justin Rodino asked Nov 9, '15

How to set launch word

Can someone direct me where/how I set in the app to use "tell" in liue of "ask" for the invocation word for my app? Right now, no matter what I seem to try, it's always "Alexa ASK " to launch the app. I'd prefer to use "Alexa tell " but can't seem to find any documentation on how. Thanks, Justin

alexa skills kit debugging

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Matt Kruse answered Nov 9, '15

You can use either syntax, and Alexa will launch your skill in the same way. But make sure to say "Alexa tell TO something".

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Galactoise answered Nov 9, '15

I don't have hard statistics to back this up, but my team has anecdotally found that to be not entirely accurate. There are certain utterances that [i]seem[/i] to work better when you use "tell" instead of "ask". Either way, though, it's certainly an edge case. Most of our stuff works just fine with both of them.

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memo@amazon answered Nov 9, '15

Hi Justin, The other posters are correct, you don't have to do anything on your side to 'enable' launch phrases. Please take a look here for supported phrases: - https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/docs/supported-phrases-to-begin-a-conversation

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Justin Rodino answered Dec 9, '15

This link greatly helps. It'd be helpful though if Alexa had other "trigger" types, rather than just the specific phrases outlined. For example, I created a skill with the trigger words "snow report". I want to say, for example, "Alexa, ask snow report conditions at XYZ". She ignores that. She specifically has to hear "ABOUT" in the middle of the request. If you say "Alexa, ask snow report ABOUT conditions at XYZ" she returns results. Her "conversational" aspect still has some tweaking, but still great progress is being made :)

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jjaquinta answered Dec 9, '15

Alexa is extremely poor at recognizing a phrase with two wildcards/slots and nothing between them. So "Alexa, ask snow report conditions at XYZ" is generically "Alexa, ask [invocation name] [phrase]". It give poor quality matches because it finds it difficult to distinguish between [invocation name] and [phrase]. But "Alexa, ask snow report ABOUT conditions at XYZ" goes to "Alexa, ask [invocation name] ABOUT [phrase]". Having the "ABOUT" constant in there partitions the problem and improves its accuracy in recognition. The same problem applies to skills. In Starlanes there are some critically important phases of the form "drop [number] [drone type]". Even though [number] is a well known parsing problem, and [drone type] is a finite list of values (custom slot), I get the poorest quality of any phrases in the skill.

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