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by laken 2971 days ago
Yeah, I was working on an Alexa skill once where I wanted the user to be able to say anything. That isn’t possible really, unless you give Alexa a really long randomly generated list of un-related/non-existent words for the “intent”, so that when Alexa tries to parse what the user says to those words, it fails and just provides its next best guess.
1 comments

Google's speech recognition is supposed to be much better, though not sure if they'd allow "one intent to rule them all" like you want.

For free-form speech recognition in Alexa, the best option I've seen mentioned on the public Alexa Slack team is using the "SearchQuery" slot. So you'd still have to make a weird catch-all intent that would eat up some of the words (and you wouldn't be able to see them). At the same time, you shouldn't assume that Alexa will give you very good results with such loose constraints. Even in my simple skill it's very bad about confusing certain pairs of words.

Might have to try google home.

As an aside, did you hit 100 enables yet? If so, congrats on the free dot :)

I.... don't know. But I doubt it :)