In my speaking engagements this year, I've been emphasizing the importance of Branding in a Voice-First world. The most critical Branding element in the verbal world is the Invocation Name. The Invocation Name is how your audience engages you verbally. An Invocation Name in the voice-first world is the same as a Domain Name on the internet. Let me say that another way: on the internet, your audience will interact with your content by visiting your website and your audience accesses your website through your domain name (aka URL). In the Voice-First world, you provide your content to your audience through a Voice App and your audience accesses your custom Voice App through your Invocation Name. So, when Google disabled thousands of Voice Apps earlier this week, it was like taking down your website.
Why is a custom Voice App Critical in a Voice-First World?
Through your website, you control what information your audience sees about you, you control your brand. On your website, you use logos, typefaces, images, navigation, etc. to control your brand. But in a verbal world, where all of your images, logos, fonts, menus, all go away, what does your brand look like (I mean, sound like). In the Voice-First world, to interact with your audience, you create a Voice Application. Google calls these Voice Applications, Google Actions. Amazon calls them, Alexa Skills. In the simplest form, a Voice Application understands verbal requests for information and provides the appropriate response. Companies and entrepreneurs are recognizing the importance of creating Voice Applications and have been building them for both the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant platforms. The last count I saw was over 100,000 Voice Applications (Alexa Skills) were available for Amazon Alexa devices and around 5,000 Voice Applications (Google Actions) were available on the Google Assistant.
Why did Google Disable Thousands of Voice Applications?
Earlier this week, Google disabled thousands of custom Voice Applications (also known as Google Actions). They did this without warning. Eventually, a notice was put on the Actions on Google console indicating that the Google Actions had been paused and were being reviewed. This was curious because every Google Action goes through a certification process by Google before they publish the Google Action. Some failure in the Google certification process must cause Google to decide to disable thousands of Google Actions while the teams at Google re-certified the Google Actions.
Now to the potential cause for taking the Google Actions down
As part of my speaking engagements this year, I've been talking about Verbal Branding and the importance of securing the Invocation Name which supports your Brand. Amazon and Google use different approaches when assigning Invocation Names. Amazon allows multiple Voice Applications to use the same Invocation Name. With Google, Invocation Names must be unique. Which means that the first person to build a Voice Application using a particular Invocation Name, owns the name. This adds urgency to building a Google Action for your Brand. To slow the Invocation Name "land-grab" that we've seen with Domain Names, Google introduced a Brand Verification as part of their certification process. So far, it has been hit-or-miss on whether a particular Invocation Name required a Brand Verification. Some of the Google Actions built by the Create My Voice team have required a Brand Verification, some have not.
When I requested additional information from the Actions-on-Google support team, they asked if any of my disabled Google Actions had been Brand Verified. This leads me to believe that at least part of the reason that Google took down thousands of Voice Applications has to do with proving Brand ownership of Invocation Names.
[Update October 20th, 2019] Google provided the following statement that the cause of the outage was:
"To ensure that Actions are in compliance with our developer policies... Once these Actions are reviewed and verified to comply with our policies, they will become available on the Assistant. We apologize for the inconvenience."
In an article posted today on Voicebot.ai, Bret Kinsella reported that "The problem may have originated in a “policy review” process but it appears that Google didn’t expect that activity to take down thousands of Google Actions worldwide."
[NOTE: This blog post has automatically been processed by the CreateMyVoice BlogToAudio reader. This means that in addition to reading it, you can hear it on any Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant device, just by asking. Just say to your Google Assistant, "Hey Google, Talk to Create My Voice". And if you prefer to talk to Alexa, just say, "Alexa, Open Create My Voice".]
