Troubleshooting Certification Failures in Smart Home and Other Domains

Having trouble with certification for smart home skills and other domains? If your skill failed certification, review the information in this guide for possible resolutions to common issues.

For certification issues with skill meta data and test credentials, see Troubleshooting General Certification Failures.

Issue: Smart home device discovery issues

If your skill supports the Smart Home Skill API or the Video Skill API, you need at least one discoverable device available during certification testing.

Symptoms

After you submit a skill for certification, the certification team can't find any discoverable devices to test and verify the functionality of your skill.

Try this

To enable testing by the certification team, make sure that account-linking test credentials are correct and at least one device is available 24 hours per day, seven days a week. To provide testing credentials, edit the testing instructions in the Alexa developer console.

Issue: Smart home skill code not invoked

The certification team verifies smart home and video skills in every language and region that your skill supports.

Symptoms

Device discovery succeeds for one language version of the skill and fails for another language.

Try this

Make sure that you deploy your Alexa Web Services (AWS) Lambda function in the AWS region associated with the skill languages and locales. For more details, see Deploy your Lambda function to multiple regions.

Try this

After you deploy your skill code in the Lambda regions associated with your skill language, make sure that you configured the Lambda endpoints in the developer console. For details about how to update the endpoint configuration, see Configure the service endpoint.

To access the Lambda function that contains your skill code, Alexa uses the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) that defines the endpoint location of the Lambda function. If your skill supports one language and region, provide the same ARN for the default ARN and the selected regional ARN. If your skill supports multiple languages and regions, you must provide ARNs for each region, and provide one of the regional ARNs for the default ARN.

Try this

You must provide test accounts for each region where you deploy your skill. The developer test account that you provided to the certification team might not be in the same region as the Lambda function. For example, the skill is in US locale and has a correct US Lambda endpoint, but the test account is a UK developer account.

Create developer test accounts in the regions where you deploy your skill and provide the account credentials to the certification team. Or, to update your developer account for a different region, see Change the marketplace on your Amazon user account.

Issue: Smart home device not responding

Symptoms

You can control your device, but your response to Alexa times out as shown in the following example.

  1. Customer asks Alexa to turn off light.
  2. Alexa sends the TurnOff directive to your Lambda function.
  3. The Lambda function receives the request and tells the device cloud to turn off the light.
  4. The device cloud handles the request and responds to the Lambda function.
  5. The Lambda function sends a response to Alexa confirming request has been handled.

If steps 3–5 takes more than eight seconds, the light turns on, but Alexa replied to the user that "Sorry, device name isn't responding.".

Try this

To make sure that the Lambda function responds within the Alexa eight second timer, verify the following items.

  1. Set the maximum execution time on your Lambda function to 8 seconds.
  2. Make sure that your device cloud responds to commands within this 8 second timer. Some interfaces support Alexa.DeferredResponse. To determine if the interfaces that your skill uses support a deferred response, check the documentation for your specific interface.
  3. Compare your JSON response to the code samples for the APIs in the Alexa Interface Reference.
  4. If applicable, use the Smart Home Test tool to run the automated tests for the following Alexa interfaces: BrightnessController, ColorController, ColorTemperatureController, PowerController and ThermostatController, if applicable.
  5. Report all properties in the StateReport so that Alexa knows the current state of the device.

Issue: Flash Briefing skill doesn't contain valid content

Keep your Flash Briefing content up-to-date. For more details, see Tips for Creating a Great Flash Briefing Skill.

Symptoms

Your Flash Briefing skill doesn't have valid content to play.

Try this

Update your content frequently, or at least every seven days during certification. Alexa pulls the date from your Flash Briefing updateDate or pubDate values.

Example of problem Example of correction

User: "Alexa, what's my Flash Briefing?"

Alexa: "From Japan news: Japan news doesn't contain any recent content at the moment." Alexa doesn't invoke the skill because the content is older than seven days.

User: "Alexa, what's my Flash Briefing?"

Skill: "From Japan news: "Yesterday, a new amusement park opened in the Odaiba area…."

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Last updated: May 01, 2024