Do your messages and prompts to your users just drone on and on? Are people begging your voice agent to stop talking and get back to work? Do you fall asleep testing your skill or action? Mark and Allen discuss how to make messages and prompts more exciting!

Inspired by a design presented at VoiceLunch US/Canada, Mark and Allen discuss how we would implement the design - consisting of keeping a "score" about user's to our skill or action, adjusting the score sometimes, and presenting different prompts based on this score. While the design seems straightforward, there are a number of interesting approaches  to the implementation.  

How would you implement this design?  

What libraries do you want to see to help make your implementations easier?

Both the Google Assistant and Alexa have routines - ways you can create your own phrases to do things. But what do developers need to do to make routines better for their users? Mark and Allen explore the differences between the two platforms and what developers need to know.  

Pages mentioned: 

Most voice skills and actions will need to work with a database or contact another service, and the most common way to do that is with an API. Web API calls are pretty common, but there are some tricks and issues when it comes to voice. Mark and Allen discuss their approaches to using APIs in their apps.

Conversations don't always go to plan, and your conversation designers may specify how to handle error recovery. But what are the basic tools we have to do so? Allen and Mark discuss what code to write to handle when things go wrong.

When we have a list of information to display on the web or on a mobile device, there are a variety of tools that we can use to manage that list. But when it comes to voice - how do we make sure that list sounds correct (and something a user will listen to)? Allen and Mark discuss the tools that developers have to manage lists.

Recently, Amazon announced the latest class of Alexa Champions, and Google announced the first GDEs for a new project category. Outstanding achievements for those named... But what are the Alexa Champions and Google GDEs? Allen (a GDE in five program areas) and Mark (an Alexa Champion and Bixby Premiere Developer) discuss what these programs are and how GDEs and Champions are expected to give back to their communities.

At "Alexa Live" last week, Amazon bombarded us with a pile of new features that developers will soon be able to take advantage of. Mark and Allen talk about which features jumped out at them, and what they're looking forward to learning more about.

Which features are you most interested in?

https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-live/release-roundup

Mark and Allen, with a little help from our friends, celebrate one year of Two Voice Devs by looking back at some of the things that have stood out for us in the past year.  

Most of all, however, we want to thank all of you for watching, listening, and sending us feedback. Here's to the next year!

Things change, sure, but what happens when the platform you've developed for deprecates and removes a feature you were using? How do you adjust? Allen and Mark discuss the impending removal of Alexa Display Templates and other technologies on Alexa and the Google Assistant that have changed over the years.