question

jjaquinta asked Dec 5, '15

Can we see the review of our own skills?

I just submitted all of the skill reviews I've been making on my blog to the new skill review feature. (Sorry to whoever is processing these!) One thing I noticed was that I could not review my own skills. That's fair enough. However, I can't even [i]SEE[/i] the reviews of my own skill. There are precious few ways to get feedback from users. Can you please make it so I can, at least, see my own skill reviews? Also, are you going to have any mechanism for responses to reviews? In my blog the skill developers would occasionally note when they fixed a problem I found, or pointed out when I got something wrong. I'm sure I'll feel the same about those reviewing my skills. So this would be helpful from all directions.

alexa skills kit

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Steve A answered Dec 5, '15

+1 for being able to see your the reviews of your own skills

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April L. Hamilton answered Dec 6, '15

Yes, very annoying not to be able to see that there even [i]are[/i] any reviews on our own skills. I can understand not wanting to let us review our own skills, but we ought to at least be able to see them.

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jjaquinta answered Dec 6, '15

For what it's worth, April, I've pasted in all my reviews of your skills onto the skills tab. So each of your skills has at least one review. Just checked. The formatting is terrible. They haven't got their entity translation right. It's full of " and stuff. A few have been reviewed by more than me. I'll cut and paste them and send them to you in e-mail. If anyone else wants to know what their reviews are, drop me a line at jo@111george.com with the name of your skills and I'll paste them to you. Hmm. I think I'll do a graph of the number of reviews vs where the skill name is alphabetically. I'm pretty sure people aren't getting more than halfway down the list.

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Levon@Amazon answered Dec 9, '15

Thanks everyone for bringing it up. We are continually working to improve your experience and hopefully this issue gets resolved soon. I don't have an ETA for this particular one, but I will get back with an update whenever I have any news. Thanks again, Levon.

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justin answered Dec 10, '15

Hi all, This issue is now fixed, and you should be able to see your skill's reviews as desired. Very sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you!

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Steve A answered Dec 10, '15

That's great! Thanks!

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jjaquinta answered Dec 10, '15

That's great and all. I'm glad to see the reviews. One small thing: I can review my own skills. Is that intentional? I'm happy to go give them 5 star ratings.

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jjaquinta answered Dec 12, '15

OK, I've given in. Just say "7sigma" go up and, within 24 hours, get two 5-star reviews. One from the COO of the 7sigma company. The other a Senior Software Systems Engineer for the same company. Clearly people are self-reviewing. If that's what I have to compete with, I'll paste in some of my own self-reviews from LinkedIn.

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Galactoise answered Dec 12, '15

I'm with Jo here - the people who built the thing should not be reviewing it. Astroturfing like this doesn't in any way help the users of Alexa-capable devices make good decisions about what skills to enable, and to a degree it devalues legitimate ratings on skills across the board. So far I've felt like the Alexa community has been extremely strong and cooperative, but this type of behavior can be quite poisonous. As things grow, I fully expect we'll start seeing the sort of shady behavior that we see in the mobile development space, etc, but at least for now maybe we could avoid this sort of blatant disregard for good practices? The fact that they didn't even bother to write real reviews - just gave it 5 stars and a 2 word comment - is a further slap in the face. That said, Jo, if Amazon does take action and pull down the fake reviews, I'd say your review counteracting theirs should probably come down, as well.

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Galactoise answered Dec 12, '15

Actually, that comment got me looking around, and I noticed some weird stuff on the 7-Minute Workout skill, as well. Specifically, there's a review titled "Testing" with a body of "testing", and a 5 star rating. That feels a little strange. Further, it has a review by Memo Doring, who I believe is the same person as Memo@Amazon. Not saying Amazon employees can't/shouldn't have opinions about third party skills, just seems a little bit weird to have certain skills getting reviews from within the company, while others sit unreviewed.

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