| I installed it. Its cool. However, it competes with first class features that are provided by the platform you are running on. Any successful voice platform will also have these features you will need to compete against. Other commenters are right - your differentiators are small and Amazon could implement them with their vast resources in a sprint or two. It's just a guess, but Alexa is probably much larger when it comes to people and money backing it. You are going to be competing with any platform you run on. It's like you are using Alexa's voice recognition component, but then rebuilding the experience on top of it. Kinda weird. Most skills extend or compliment the platform. Now I'll have to make sure I use Lifebot instead of Alexa to get a certain feature - its a bad CX if you ask me. How are you making money? I highly doubt Amazon is paying you to compete with them on core platform functionality. Also - you have to you give your phone number for the SMS to work. If you have Alexa and enabled communications - it would even be easy for Amazon to implement "Alexa, send that story to Bob" and then it SMS a link to your friend. Do you have their friends contacts too? etc. If you integrated with IFFTT, or somehow interacted with the first party features to extend them it'd be interesting, but even still then Amazon is only a few weeks away from doing any one of these things. |
We do recognise that in a sense we are competing against the native features of the platforms we are running on. But this is always a risk when building on top of platforms. If you take the analogy of mobile - iOS and Android both have native apps for things like notes and reminders - but this doesn't stop 3rd parties creating better versions of them for people that want a bit more in terms of functionality. This is what we're trying to do with Life Bot.
Right now our differentiators may be small, but people are finding them useful and we're working hard to add more based on the feedback we're getting. (Stay tuned!)
Whilst Amazon and Google could have teams sitting there looking out for popular voice apps they could copy features from and implement natively, based on the big pushes they are making to try and bring 3rd party developers to the platform, in my opinion it would be a strange thing for them to do if they just constantly copied the popular ones as native features.
For example the way I see it is that for Amazon, the goal is to get more people shopping through voice. By building an great productivity experience on top of Alexa we're not going against this, in fact we think we'll aid it by the fact more people will want to buy the devices because of the features of Life Bot.
On the invocation --> Having to say "Life Bot" as well as Alexa or Google is additional work for the user, but we think that this is worth it for the enhanced features.
On monetisation --> there are definitely options available to us, for example premium features. But as I'm sure you've seen by testing the product we're still quite early and won't be doing this anytime soon. Amazon are also paying the top skill developers quite significant amounts (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/rewards) if your a developer looking for a bit of extra $ I would definitely check that out!
On contact sharing --> This is something we don't do currently but are exploring as it's been requested quite a few times.
Hopefully that explains our view on all your points - thanks again for testing out the Skill and sharing such detailed feedback!