[danvasquez29]

I'm not really sure why you think it's Amazon only or a walled garden. I have limited experience with it but from the research I've done thus far it seems to have a fairly robust development platform.

I'm under the impression that if it feels Amazon-only it's because of a failure of companies and devs to take advantage of the platform, not a failure of the platform itself. For example the Google services you're asking about, is that Amazon's fault or has Google not taken the time to develop that app because they're focusing on their own product?

I've used my echo dot most often with 3rd party services so far (daily briefing integrations, capital one, yahoo fantasy football).

[awgneo]

I agree with this perspective. However, you have to wonder why we don't have more Alexa skills in the platform. Here are a couple of my thoughts.

1. They require you to say "Alexa, tell <app_name> to <do_something>"; This pushes all 3rd party services one level deeper.

2. Amazon competes with too many companies and services these days. Instacart devs won't want to work on a skill within a platform that is itself is a competitor.

[danvasquez29]

#1 does get annoying. I think it does make the experience a little more jarring having to use the same sentence structure for each question. For example, if I want an update on my fantasy football team, I have to say "Alexa, ask yahoo fantasy football"... this is weird and not natural. In normal conversation, I would say "ask yahoo", which isn't specific enough, or skip right to "alexa what's going on with my fantasy team?" since I only have the one team and one integration capable of dealing with fantasy sports.

#2 I agree is an issue. I wonder if with the current environment any independent would be allowed to gain traction, or would the competitors lock them out of services that users find mandatory (amazon shopping lists, google search, apple music, etc).

[dharma1]

Plus if you have a million skills on the platform, the namespace for reasonable things will fill up pretty quick, consider you evoke each skill by the app name

[sharemywin]

I agree 100% #2.