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jjaquinta avatar image
jjaquinta asked

Request clarification on User IDs

1) I remember seeing answers in the forum indicating that the User ID give to a skill is unique to a user, and unique per developer account, but consistent across different skills by the same developer. 2) However, I have also seen it said that when a user disables a skill, then re-enables it, that their User ID changes. These both can't be true. Has the implementation of (2) superseded (1)?
alexa skills kitsubmission testing certification
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Steve A avatar image
Steve A answered
Yep. There's no way to keep track of users (by user id) across skills, or after disabling/reenabling the skill. Steve
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Galactoise avatar image
Galactoise answered
User ID is absolutely unique per skill, unfortunately. This is becoming a bigger and bigger concern for the things we're building. Long term, I think a shared identifier of some sort is going to become more important to this ecosystem than any of the other pending feature requests.
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jjaquinta avatar image
jjaquinta answered
Yes, it's an issue. I just introduced cross skill advertising. I'd love to be able to measure the pass through rate. I.e. how effective is my advertising? Without this I have no way of working out if someone who saw the ad, followed through and started using the other skill. Now, if Amazon introduced cookies to skills....
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Galactoise avatar image
Galactoise answered
Yep, that's one of the use cases I was thinking of. Cross-skill promotion was one of the things that was important to us when we built out CompliBot and InsultiBot. There are a bunch of other cases, as well - I need to find some time to formulate the argument fully.
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jjaquinta avatar image
jjaquinta answered
If you are still interested, let me know. I'm writing the stuff I'm doing so that it could eventually be an ad-sharing network between skill developers. I.e. a service where you can identify your skill, and ask for an ad. Later register that you served up that ad. Quotas could be set so that you could have a sort of impression barter system. I.e. if you've served up an ad for my skill X times, then you won't be sent my app to advertise until my app has served up at least X impressions of your skill. First I have to prove that cross skill advertising has any benefit at all. Since I can't do a direct comparison, I have to wait a week or so to see if the numbers on the skills trend with any significance.
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Nick Gardner avatar image
Nick Gardner answered
From the OP, 2) should is the correct description of current behavior. In other words, a user ID is only unique within the context of that skill, and once they disable and re-enable the skill they are considered a totally new user. -Nick
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