[ahmeni]

Normal people don't want to have a conversation with their Alexa device. They want simple, reliable commands to do the common things in their household. Anyone who's tried to order something off Amazon through a screenless Echo knows the pain.

Skills were always dead in the water the minute they required an AWS account and a Lambda deployment to get going. That's a miserable thing to develop (and an AWS account itself being a looming financial liability) and maintain even if you're familiar with all the inner junctions of Lambda and IAM.

[huytersd]

Isn’t it just like Apple. You host the app on your own servers right? And you need a developer account to do all of that.