I wrote my first skill for Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices. (A “skill” is a way to add functionality to Alexa; other platforms would call it an add-on, plugin, or extension.) It was supposed to be a way for your kids to find things to do when they’re bored. Here’s how my blog post about it was originally going to read:

Do you have an Amazon Alexa-enabled device? Do you have children? Are those children ever bored? If your answers were “yes,” “yes,” and “yes of course all the time,” then do I have an Alexa skill for you!

It’s called “I’m Bored.” Enable the skill in your Alexa app, and then just say, “Alexa, I’m bored” (or to be more precise, “Alexaaaaa… I’m boooooooooooooooooored”). Alexa will then give you something to do. Examples include:

• “Why don’t you play a game of tag. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
• “You could write a fan letter to a famous person. Let me know how it goes.”
• “Why not build a blanket fort? I wish I could do that too, but I’m way up here in the cloud.”

The list of suggestions is ever-increasing and appropriate for all ages.

If your kids like to shake things up, Alexa will also respond to “What can I dooooooooo?”, “What’s there to doooooooo?”, and “There’s nothing to dooooooo!”

Sadly though, my skill was rejected after a five-week “Certification” process. The reason? At some point, I checked a checkbox indicating that the skill was “directed to children under the age of 13.” I understood this to mean “Is your skill appropriate for children under the age of 13?”, but really, it means, “Should we reject your skill after waiting five weeks?” (In reality, the checkbox is a COPPA compliance measure, but with ambiguous wording.)

Hopefully, Amazon will clarify the language in the submission process. They certainly aren’t limiting Alexa to ages 13 and up, as evidenced by some of the currently approved skills:

(I wonder if the engineers that worked on Alexa ever in their wildest dreams imagined that they’d enable people around the world to say, “Alexa, ask fart sound to fart jokes.”)

I’ve resubmitted my skill with the checkbox (correctly) unchecked, so maybe there’s still a chance for it. In any case, the skill’s source code is available on GitHub.