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Step 11: Test for Certification (VSK Fire TV)

The following guidelines detail the user experience requirements to certify your video skill. Review these guidelines carefully to ensure that your Fire TV video skill meets the certification requirements. The guidelines here include a list of the individual test cases that Amazon reviews your skill against for skill launch quality.

Prerequisites and Notes

As part of the capability discovery payload, you declare the capabilities of your skill, such as channel change, quick play, and search. Your skill then needs to pass certification for those capabilities, following the guidelines listed. As you are creating your skill, list the capabilities that you plan to support in the testing instructions field. This certification test cases below provide a list of possible utterances. Make sure you test your skill with these utterances before you consider your integration to be complete.

Targeting Your Video Skill on Fire TV Devices

When you test your skill on a Fire TV device, make sure you target your skill through any of the following methods:

  • Explicitly target your skill: You can explicitly target your skill in your utterances by saying, "Alexa, watch X on <video provider>" or "Alexa, show me comedies on <video provider>."

  • Launch your skill from the Home screen: You can find your skill in on the Fire TV launcher home screen and click it to open it. Then your utterances are evaluated in the context of your video skill.

  • Launch your skill by means of voice: You can also open your skill by voice by saying "Alexa, open <video provider>."

When you target your skill like this, Alexa performs commands and other lookups within the context of your app and catalog, rather than looking across all video skills on the device.

Overall Certification Requirements

Your skill must meet the requirements listed in the following sections to pass certification.

  • Latency Requirements: Your skill's end-to-end latency should be comparable to or better than currently-live video skills on Fire TV apps.
  • Error Handling: If your media player has trouble during playback, the player should handle the error and display an error message so that users are aware of what is happening and broadcast that error. For more information about how to broadcast errors, see Error Handling.
  • Continuous Play for TV Series VOD: If a user is currently watching a TV series, continuous play is recommended and supported. Once a new episode is playing, you must broadcast the capabilities of that next episode. If it is a single episode, you must honor the user's request and close the session.

Testing Alexa Enablement

When you integrated the Alexa Client Library, you enabled the client manager with this code:

clientManager.setAlexaEnabled(true);

The recommendation is to enable Alexa (setting it to true) only for subscribed customers. As you log in and out of your app, check whether this is set appropriately.

Scenario Expected Experience
Validate setAlexaEnabled property set to true for a subscribed user When a user signs in, setAlexaEnabled is set to true.
Validate setAlexaEnabled property set to false when signing out from the app When a user signs out, setAlexaEnabled is set to false.

Testing Utterance Support

Your video skill must provide appropriate responses to the utterances you support. To determine what capabilities your skill provides, Alexa sends the Discover directive to your Lambda. You list your supported capabilities in the capabilities section in the Discover.Response. See Discovery Interface for more details.

If your app doesn't support a capability (for example, you might not support ChangeChannel if your app doesn't have channels), you don't have to certify against those utterances. And if you don't claim support for ChangeChannel directives, Alexa won't send those directives to your Lambda.

However, if your skill only supports certain capabilities for an interface, your responses should provide the appropriate handling for unsupported actions.

See the Utterances Reference for a detailed list of the various utterances that Fire TV devices support, including each phrase by locale as well. Utterances are grouped by the directives that Alexa sends when it hears the utterance.

Utterances are listed for all directives:

Response Performance Requirements

The table describes the latency limits for SearchAndDisplay and SearchAndDisplayResults directives by call percentage.

Call Percentage Latency Limit
(in milliseconds)
50% 50 ms
90% 100 ms
99% 200 ms

Next Steps

After you've finished testing your app, see Go Live with Your Skill.

(If you run into any issues that prevent you from continuing, see Troubleshooting for Cloudside Integrations.)

Last updated: Oct 13, 2021