question

RJ Scott asked Oct 26, '15

Alexa custom slot text is ignoring the last word in my phrase

I've got a custom slot called DEVICE_NAME. In the slot, I've populated a number of potential device names. For example, I've got: office lamp office cans office main light office outlet When I send a command to the Echo, saying "office cans" Alexa will generally only send me "office." In this case, office isn't even one of the items I've entered in my list. My utterance is: ActivateDevice {mode} the {deviceName} With mode being a custom slot with items such as "turn off" and "turn on." Would it work better to not use a custom slot in this case? Or would I run into the same problem using a literal? Is there another way to smooth this out and make it more accurate?

alexa skills kit voice-user interface

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jjaquinta answered Oct 27, '15

I had the same problem with Alexa returning a value not on my custom slot text. It does actually say in the fine print that it will do this. So, technically, it isn't a bug. However, since my problem had it returning "attack drums" even though "attack drones" was on the list, I think they do have a serious problem with confidence levels when matching slots. I think there is a bug in there somewhere that, if they fix it, will improve these sorts of things.

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memo@amazon answered Nov 6, '15

Hello RJ Scott, Can you please share the Application ID for your Skill? Thanks,

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RJ Scott answered Nov 28, '15

Yes, here's the application ID: amzn1.echo-sdk-ams.app.84e55b57-2c47-438d-a4de-9b0a033f7164

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Ross@Amazon answered Dec 9, '15

We were unable to reproduce the issue you were having. The utterances mentioned seemed to work fine. Are you still having trouble with this issue?

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Galactoise answered Dec 10, '15

We have (very anecdotally) seen similar things in the past - where parts of the utterance will just never be passed in to our service, no matter how clearly enunciated they are. It doesn't happen often, and sometimes changing other parts of the utterance cause the behavior to disappear, but I've definitely seen this happen a couple times across a couple different skills.

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Galactoise answered Dec 10, '15

Actually, just confirmed that we've seen this as recently as today. The request clips off the slot in one of our utterances where the slot is the last thing in the sentence. It's worth noting that how you invoke the skill does seem to matter, in this case. There are three different patterns: "Alexa, tell mySkill do {something}" (Without remote, new session) "tell mySkill do {something}" (With remote, new session) "do {something}" (With or without remote, active session) We've found that we run into this issue when using the full command, with wake word, but not when we use the shorter versions.

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Ross@Amazon answered Dec 14, '15

The SDK team said that it is difficult to determine without knowing the specific utterances that failed, but they expect you'll get better performance by changing the skill invocation name from "insultibot" to something that is easier to interpret, such as "insult bot." Note that there may be a short delay for this update to have a real impact on speech recognition. Also consider using AMAZON.US_FIRST_NAME as the type of your "target" slot.

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Galactoise answered Dec 14, '15

Ross, thanks for leaking our super secret unreleased skill name to the forums. =p Anyhow, to your point of renaming the invocation, we did try many different invocations, including the one you recommend, to no avail. We had a different thread about those issues ( https://forums.developer.amazon.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=10102), and memo@amazon said he would look into it. I just want to make sure I'm not hijacking this thread in case RJ Scott's issue is different than what my team is running into. That said, thanks for the suggestion on the amazon slot type - none of us knew that existed. Was US_FIRST_NAME one of the original amazon slot types, or did that get added on later?

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jjaquinta answered Dec 15, '15

I saw US_FIRST_NAME mentioned in last week's Amazon update. But I haven't found any reference to it in the docs. I wanted to confirm this and then contact them. I have compiled name-lists of first and last names for 20+ languages that I used for the "NameMe" application ( http://www.ocean-of-storms.com/nameme, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tzatzatzu.nameme, https://www.facebook.com/NameMePage). I was considering donating them to Amazon. (But the snarky and pedantic certification reply I got this morning has left me feeling less charitable. I need to see how I feel after coffee.) There were a few other, less useful, intents also mentioned. But, again, the list of built in intents in the documentation hadn't been updated when I looked.

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Ross@Amazon answered Dec 24, '15

References to the AMAZON.US_FIRST_NAME slot type can be found in the following documentation: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/docs/alexa-skills-kit-interaction-model-reference#Slot%20Types https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/docs/defining-the-voice-interface#The%20Speech%20Input%20Data

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