In the Guidelines "should" is apparently "must"

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Amazon Customer asked Jan 15, '16

In the Guidelines "should" is apparently "must"

This might have been obvious to everybody else but I did not realize that the guidelines were stricter than their wording would indicate. I just received a rejection for my first Alexa Skill and the only problem was that my invocation was four words: "[i]teen dating violence quiz[/i]" The guidelines state "[i]The name should be at least two syllables and no longer than three words. One-syllable names are not supported.[/i]" which I had interpreted as "We have a preference that the name be at least two syllables and no longer than three words BUT one-syllable names are not supported." Not a big deal but assuming I'm not the only one who interprets this similarly, this is a completely unnecessary time sink for Amazon's Certifying group. I realize that "should" is more polite than "must" but it's also less imprecise! If Amazon is listening it might help the process if you replace the many many "should"s with "must"s!

alexa skills kit submission testing certification

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Answer 1 · 2016-01-15T00:38:41Z

Galactoise answered Jan 15, '16

I haven't run into your specific problem, but I will say that there's been a growing sentiment of late among this development community that the certification process as currently defined is more harmful than helpful. There are a lot of places where what seems like a best practice or rule of thumb is being enforced as an edict, and that's caused a lot of frustration among many of us. While it went unaddressed for quite a while, to Amazon's credit they do appear to be undergoing some degree of introspection about it now, so hopefully the end result is a more malleable, context-aware process instead of this hardline approach.

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Answer 2 · 2016-01-15T01:04:47Z

justin answered Jan 15, '16

Thanks Drew, We apologize for the confusion and this is great feedback -- I'm passing this along to have it updated to be more concise. Please feel free to add any additional inconsistencies you may have found in our documentation. Cheers, Justin

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Answer 3 · 2016-01-15T02:39:45Z

jjaquinta answered Jan 15, '16

The strictness is a problem, but so is the variability. The difference between "should" and "must" is subjective, as are many of the edicts handed down by whatever certifier you happen to get when your skill is submitted. Different people + subjectivity = inconsistent standards = impossible to make a business plan around.

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