Alexa Skills – Goodbye Storyline/Invocable

Some time ago, I posted how Storyline, the free online tool I had used to write my first Alexa skills, had changed to Invocable, a paid platform charging developer level charges for hosting (i.e. hundreds of dollars a month).

At the time, however, they said existing skills would continue to work, even if you didn’t pay, you just wouldn’t be able to make changes.

For me, that put the writing on the wall, and so I was really not surprised to hear that they are now closing down Invocable too. Everything will stop by September.

I didn’t sign up to the paid service, and I have only two skills still hosted with them. However, one of them is Pill Tray, which is important to me, and a couple of other people are also using.

They did say they were going to provide an export tool, so you could at least get some documented notes of your skill. That never came about. Now they are completely closing, they are touting that again – “real soon” – while offering a free export to yet another tool that isn’t run by them, but someone in partnership with them.

Sounds like a total scam to lock people into yet another platform.

It will be a pain to have to write pill tray from scratch, but if I have to, I will. From now on, all skills will be written by hand, and hosted directly from Amazon’s AWS.

There really ain’t so such thing…

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