Games push the boundaries of tech, enabling us to learn from them for a wide range of use cases. Join Gal Shenar, founder of Stoked Skills, in this talk about designing and implementing Alexa in-skill purchasing for “Escape the Room” and “Escape the Airplane” game skills. Learn about optimizing the user experience by soft launching with live updates and implementing a premium content in-skill purchase gate while monitoring user experience flow to increase conversion rates by using AWS Lambda.

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Three Lessons From Escape The Room That Apply
to Making Money With Your Alexa Skills
Paul Cutsinger
Head of Developer Education
Alexa
A L X 3 1 2
Gal Shenar
Founder
Stoked Skills

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Three Sections…
Intro - Gaming on Alexa
1. Designing your Game Skill
2. Monetize your Game Skill
3. How to Engage your Users

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…Three Takeaway Lessons
1. Make your game easy to play but
hard to master
2. Help should appear when
needed, and disappear when done
3. You will not get it right the first
time - observe your players and
adapt the difficulty level

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Gaming on Alexa – Casual Games

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Gaming on Alexa – Games Helpers and Reference

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Gaming on Alexa – Interactive Stories

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Gal from Stoked Skills
Who am I
How I started
My Skills

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Design Your Skill
Monetize
Engage

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Evolving the Idea
Design your story
&
Create your personas

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Audio Choices
Voice acting or Alexa?

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From Story to VUI
To build Escape the Room, we broke down an open ended
exploration game into 4 main actions:
○ Looking Around
○ Looking at Objects
○ Using Items with Objects
○ Solving Puzzles

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Modular Building
From the beginning we wanted Escape
the Room to be modular and easily
extensible.
Just fill in the story and add your logic
and you are good to go.
This is the code for a vent object→

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Fail Gracefully
Handle the unexpected
What if the users say…

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Test and Adapt
Beta Testing
Find people who have never seen the skill
Live Updates
Measure and act upon it

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Scale
What if your skill gets popular… …really
popular?
AWS Lambda
Amazon DynamoDB

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Design Your Skill
Monetize
Engage

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Monetizing My Skills
Hint hint…

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When To Offer?
“…Monetizing Alexa Skills can be one of the
most frictionless
purchase experiences a customer can
have…”
Offer your purchases at the right moments -
don’t bother them when they are busy.

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In-Skill Purchasing - Consumables

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In-Skill Purchasing – One-Time Purchases

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Entitlement Sample json

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In-Skill Purchasing - Subscriptions

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Make Money with Alexa
In-skill Purchasing
Sell Goods and Services
Build Skills for Brands
Developer Rewards

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Design Your Skill
Monetize
Engage

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Variety
If your skill has repetition in it, make sure to vary your responses
so the game remains engaging.
Here is a simple snippet you can use to randomize the messages
that a user receives

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Sound Effects
Listening to speech can be slow and draining, sound effects can
convey context to the user with very little time. Use this to your
advantage!
○ Escape the Room uses sound effects in solving puzzles
○ Wordplay uses sound to convey letters that are right and wrong
○ Angel Investor uses sound effects for different events

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SSML
SSML is how you make Alexa use natural expressions
And you can test it directly in the dev console

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Memory
Identify and remember your users progress. Don’t repeat every instruction every
time. If your user knows how to play, just let them play!
AWS
Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
AWS
IAM
Echo Alexa skill

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How To Measure
Analytics
Measure and iterate

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What To Measure
Find a metric and try to improve it. Can
you affect how long your users play by
tweaking your intro, or adjusting the voice
model?

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Intent history

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Interaction Path Analysis

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Three Takeaway Lessons
1. Make your game easy to play but
hard to master
2. Help should appear when
needed, and disappear when done
3. You will not get it right the first
time - observe your players and
adapt the difficulty level

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What will you build?
- Make money with ISP
- Adapt your VUI to humans
- Build at Scale (AWS can help you)
- Use analytics
- Play the game!
alexa.design/isp

38. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Gal Shenar
@StokedSkills
Max Amordeluso
@maxamorde

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Repeat Sessions
Thursday, November 29th
ALX312-R1 [REPEAT 1]
Three Lessons from “Escape the Room” That Apply to Making Money with Your Alexa Skills
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm | MGM

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Related Sessions
Wednesday, November 28th
ALX403-R Supercharge Any Alexa Skill by Understanding What Games Do
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm | MGM
Thursday, November 29th
ALX403-R2 [REPEAT] Supercharge Any Alexa Skill by Understanding What Games Do
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm | Mirage
Thursday, November 29th
ALX405-R2 [REPEAT 2] Build a Game for Echo Buttons - an Alexa Gadget!
2:30 pm – 4:45 pm | Aria

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