AiC Episode 126

In this episode, Teri welcomes Drew Cosgrove, an Amazon Alexa Games developer and publisher.

Welcome, Drew!

Drew spent 25 years in IT but felt he needed to get back to coding, the love of which had drawn him to technology in the first place. When Amazon introduced Echo in the UK, he was a senior IT architect and he knew he’d found just the opportunity he needed to sharpen his skills and build a rewarding new career as a voice developer. Working in management felt like he was getting farther away from what he really loved to do, so he began looking for a way to get back to his technical roots, and that’s when Alexa appeared.

He actually did far more than reviving his coding skills; he left the corporate world to work for himself as an Alexa skills developer. In under two years, he has published 30 engaging game skills for Alexa in several languages, attracting over 65,000 active monthly users. As the winner of multiple prizes in the UK’s monthly Alexa contest, Cosgrove says building skills for Alexa has changed his life.

Background

  • He used to work with O2, the UK mobile phone company and then worked as an IT consultancy before becoming a full-time Alexa skills developer.
  • He creates his games independently and some of his skills are top-ranked in Canada.

His Top Skills

  • Feel the Pressure is one of his Alexa Games that are very popular in Canada.
  • Another one is Animal Letters, and this one is never really finished because he keeps improving and changing it by adding more animals, sound effects, and more functionality.
  • He also keeps improving on Feel the Pressure and it has different voices depending on the location, for example, the voice is different in the UK than it is in the US.

Alexa Games in Canada with Drew Cosgrove

Developing Skills and the Associated Challenges

  • The first challenge he didn’t realize when he started was speech recognition. The technology is much better now than it was in the past, but it’s not perfect. When it works, it’s magical, but when it doesn’t work, it’s terrible.
  • When someone speaks to a smart speaker and it doesn’t understand them, it can be frustrating, and that concerned Drew a lot because his Alexa games rely heavily on speech recognition.
  • A huge amount of his efforts go towards ensuring that he compensates for any speech recognition issues. He does that through a lot of testing.

Making Money in the Space

  • Alexa developers have two ways of making money, namely, by being rewarded by Amazon or through in-skill purchases.
  • The Amazon rewards program does not apply to skills that are available in Canada.
  • In-skill purchases is where users pay a small fee to use a skill. Some of Drew’s skills go for 99 cents. Users can also buy some functionalities.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

Other Useful Resources:

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