At Rocket we have always put a lot of thought into the FTUE (First Time User Experience) for any of our mobile or web applications. However, until recently, this topic was often overlooked for our voice skills. The more we thought about this, the more we realized that getting the FTUE right in voice was as important, if not more important in voice. The reason for this lies in the famous saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words". When users come to an app, their brains quickly digest a lot of

Introducing the Alexa Audio Encoding Tool [http://www.rocketinsights.com/voice/alexa-encoding-tool/] The alexa ecosystem allows developers to play back audio in two unique ways. The first is to leverage the Amazon audio player. This is ideal for when you want to play a whole song, think Spotify skill, but the challenge is that you are turning control over to the audio player. Once you hand over control it's no longer possible to mix spoken text with your audio files. The other way is to mix a

At the end of each project we always like to debrief and identify what we learned so that we can share and leverage that knowledge in future projects. Fortunately, the nascent nature of developing for the amazon alexa ecosystem has provided us with plenty of opportunity to learn! This post is how we leveraged custom slots in some new powerful ways in order to deliver our most recent project [https://www.amazon.com/Crackle-Inc-Ask-Titanium-Rex/dp/B072Q9WFSZ] for Sony Crackle. For those unfamili