| > 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. Every single successful platform does exactly this. Facebook, Google, Apple. > 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. As someone who has an Echo Show, an Echo dot, and an original echo, I can tell you that the friction added by having to say the skill name makes me never use it. I can imagine this is the case for a vast majority of non-power users who don't use IFTTT or some other niche skill. > 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! Your payment is based on your ability to keep your replacement experiences better than Amazons and all of their competitors, as well as all of the other skills that can focus on just one of your features and out-sprint you. Looks like you have a lot of experience building skills and thinking about voice interactions. If I were you - I'd focus on providing something truly unique through voice - something that Apple, Google, or Amazon can't squash you with by sneezing. Even all the stuff covered in your tech crunch article is already done by competitors in some form. I wish you luck. I don't expect you to find a way to monetize this faster than Google Amazon or Apple will find a way to monetize skills in general, in which case you'll be competing against niche apps for every feature you provide under the life bot umbrella. This will spread you thin. And I would be totally surprised if you raised money on the idea. Sorry for the hyper critical feedback. Y'all seem super passionate and I want to see more cool voice apps for my Echo. But I can't help but feel many skills developers are simply re-inventing the wheel. |