Alexa Skill & Google Action Certification

What You'll Need To Get Your Alexa Skill & Google Action Certified
Get Started

What You Need To Get Your Alexa Skill

or Google Action Certified & Publicly Available


Below is an evolving list of what you’ll need to have your Alexa Skill and Google Action approved, certified and available for public use on Alexa and Google Assistant devices.

Getting your Alexa skill or Google Action approved and certified can take some time depending on the backlog at Amazon and Google.  It’s important to be prepared when you submit your skill for review so that you only have to go through the approval process once.

Below is a comprehensive list and explanation of terms and requirements necessary to have your voice application available on the most popular smart speaker devices. In just a few minutes you’ll learn about:

Public Skill Name & Invocation Names

Alexa Skill & Google Action Best Practices

Skill Icons & Artwork

Legal Requirements: Privacy Policy & Terms of Use

Public Skill Name versus Invocation Name

What you name your voice app and how users invoke or interact with your skill are critical to your success. It’s important to understand what Skill and Invocation Names are and how they work differently between Alexa and Google Home.

Alexa Skill Public & Invocation Names

There are two important items that affect people finding your skill and using it:

  1. Public Skill name. e.g., EmailMonkey

This is the name of the skill that will be displayed to users in the Alexa app. It can be different from your invocation name and must be between 2-50 characters.

Users of your Alexa Skill “enable” your skill to work with their device(s) by this name. This skill name is different from the invocation name.

  1. Invocation name. e.g., “EmailMonkey

This is what people say to invoke your skill once they’ve enabled it. For example, after the skill is enabled, the user can say “Alexa, open EmailMonkey” or “Alexa, ask EmailMonkey to send an email to Lisa.”. With Alexa, the Invocation Name does NOT need to be unique. In other words, other Alexa Skills could share the invocation name with your skill.

Note that the invocation name can be different from the skill name, but we don’t recommend it because it can confuse people. If you need some help, try “Hear it from a Skill Builder: How to Pick a Skill Invocation Name“.

 

Actions (Skills) for Google Assistant & Invocation Names

The “skill” name (Google calls them Actions) and the invocation name need to be the same. Unlike with Amazon, users don’t explicitly “enable” a Google skill or action because all Google Action names are unique. There are some exceptions.

Google names are like web domain names in that they MUST be UNIQUE. First come first served. And, Google does not allow people to reserve a lot of names, or even change them often.

If your Google skill name contains what Google terms “branded” names, they mandate you prove you own the name. This is generally done by showing them that you own the web domain name of the same.

Back to TOP OF PAGE

Alexa Skill & Google Action Best Practices

These basic fields are required for all Alexa Skills and Actions for Google Assistant.

One Sentence Description

A quick at-a-glance sentence that describes the skill or what customers can do with it. This will display in the skill list in the Alexa app. For example, “This Assisted Living Community voice application is to enhance residence life of the clients of Dual Path.”

Detailed Description

A more comprehensive description of this skill. Include information about any prerequisites like hardware or account requirements and detailed steps for the customer to get started. This description displays to customers on the skill detail card in the Alexa app.

Example Phrases

Sample utterances that will appear on the skill detail card in the Alexa App. These phrases will help users get started and enable them to access your skill’s core functionality.

Category

The category that best describes your skill. This helps customers find your skill quickly and easily.

Keywords

Simple search words that relate to or describe this skill. This helps customers find the skill quickly and easily in the Alexa & Google app. Use spaces or commas in between each search term.

 

Back to TOP OF PAGE

Skill Artwork / Icons

Even with a voice app you want your Alexa Skill to be visually appealing and stand out from the other Skills in the Alexa app.
 
 

Alexa Skill Icons

Amazon Small Skill Icon 108×108 (png preferred)
Amazon Large Skill Icon 512×512 (png preferred)

Google Action Icons

Google Small Icon 192×192 (png preferred): A small logo which will be shown in the Actions directory, as well as other places where your Actions are referenced

Google Large Skill Banner 1920×1080 (png preferred): A large banner image which will be shown at the top of your listing in the Actions directory.

 

Back to TOP OF PAGE

Unable to Remove Alexa Skills from Store

Unable to Remove Alexa Skills from Store

Alexa can be the roach motel of skills; They go IN but don't come OUT Developers unable to remove their skills from the Alexa Store   We had an instance where we needed to remove a skill from the Alexa store for a period of time. Normally, this is easy: just...

Which Smart speaker is best for your business?

Which Smart speaker is best for your business?

Choosing your smart speaker vendor Alexa or Google? Navigating hardware decisions We founded Voice2Biz Inc years ago on the premise that our technology and services would serve all smart speakers so whatever device you chose, we’d be there. Initially, that meant all...

Alexa’s Showstopper bugs in their APL code

Oh, the many challenges with Alexa Presentation Language (APL) Our experience with Alexa Skills Challenge: Beyond Voice Amazon periodically holds hackathon contests to get Alexa developers to build skills that use certain Alexa capabilities. The most recent one is the...

World Meet MAVIS

World Meet MAVIS

Meet MAVIS - Multimedia Audio Visual Interface System   Today we are proud to introduce the world to MAVIS. MAVIS stands for Multimedia Audio Visual Interface System and is the product of 7+ person years of technology development combined into one powerful...

Contact Us To Discuss Your Voice App

Unable to Remove Alexa Skills from Store

Unable to Remove Alexa Skills from Store

Alexa can be the roach motel of skills; They go IN but don't come OUT Developers unable to remove their skills from the Alexa Store   We had an instance where we needed to remove a skill from the Alexa store for a period of time. Normally, this is easy: just...

read more
Which Smart speaker is best for your business?

Which Smart speaker is best for your business?

Choosing your smart speaker vendor Alexa or Google? Navigating hardware decisions We founded Voice2Biz Inc years ago on the premise that our technology and services would serve all smart speakers so whatever device you chose, we’d be there. Initially, that meant all...

read more