Alexa: Amazon makes life difficult for suppliers like "Bring!"
3/7/2024
Translation: machine translated
If you use an Alexa app to create and manage shopping lists or notes, this has been much more complicated since 1 July. At least if it is an app from a so-called third-party provider.
Amazon is no longer so friendly to developers of apps for the Alexa smart home speakers. At least not to those who offer applications that Amazon believes are better than its own. Apps that you use to manage to-do lists or your shopping list via voice control have no longer had access to Alexa's Amazon API since the beginning of July.
In practice, this means less convenience. Once set up, you could previously use "Add broccoli to the shopping list", for example, to instruct Alexa to add the vegetables to the list in the "Bring!" app, which is popular in Switzerland. Since the beginning of the month, this only works with a voice command that also tells Alexa the app. The command then reads:
Alexa, open Bring and add broccoli to the shopping list.
On the one hand, this is longer. On the other hand, the Bring-specific addition can easily be forgotten. As a result, the items for the weekly shop end up on Alexa's own list. However, this shopping list is not nearly as clever as that of the specialist from Switzerland. There, the products are automatically grouped sensibly: Vegetables to other vegetables, beer to wine, dairy products and so on. Alexa, on the other hand, has a list with the most recently added items at the top.
The change not only affects the Swiss supplier of lists, which is probably insignificant for Amazon. The apps "Anylist" and "Todoist", which are widely used in the USA, will also have to educate their users to use different voice commands. This is because what Amazon told developers of third-party apps in a blog article at the end of May, quite shortly before the changeover, applies to all of them:
From 1 July 2024, you will no longer be able to use list skills or the List Management REST API to access Alexa lists in your skills or apps, i.e. Alexa shopping and to-do lists.
Google and Apple don't like third-party apps either
It is not clear whether Amazon wants to promote the sale of its own products with this change. At the very least, the Alexa shopping list does not yet contain any information if a product is available in their online shop. And Amazon is not alone in excluding third-party applications: Google Home has also recently excluded the direct creation of shopping lists. It was never even possible with Siri from Apple. However, with the additional command as to which app you want to use, it works.
As a previous heavy user of "Bring!" on our home Alexa - actually the only useful application - I'm curious to see whether I'll get used to the new command. Or whether Alexa will be used even less as a result.
Header image: Martin Jungfer
Martin Jungfer
Head of Content
Martin.Jungfer@digitecgalaxus.chJournalist since 1997. Stopovers in Franconia (or the Franken region), Lake Constance, Obwalden, Nidwalden and Zurich. Father since 2014. Expert in editorial organisation and motivation. Focus on sustainability, home office tools, beautiful things for the home, creative toys and sports equipment.