Choosing your invocation name is a very important part of the process to get your business on voice assistants.  (An invocation name is the name your customers use when asking your business a question on voice assistants, i.e. “Alexa, launch Joe’s Pizza.” or “Alexa, ask Joe’s Pizza, what are your specials?”). If you want your invocation name to be the same on all voice platforms, you will want to read through all of these instructions to ensure you choose a name that qualifies on all available platforms.

Rules / Tips that Apply to All Platforms

• The skill invocation name must not infringe upon the intellectual property rights of an entity or person. Avoid trademarked or copyrighted names (unless it belongs to you).
• Nothing in your skill (invocation name, description, Q&A content, logo image) can contain sensitive or illegal content. Be diligent to ensure you aren’t including anything illegal, content containing profanity, or content that does not belong to you.
• One-word invocation names are not allowed, unless the invocation name is unique to your brand/intellectual property with proof of ownership established through legitimate documentation. Compound words broken into multiple words will not circumvent this requirement, for example key board counts as one word.
• Invocation names that include names of people or places (for example, "molly", "seattle") are not allowed, unless they contain other words (for example, "molly's horoscope," "seattle spotlight," "sam's market").
• Two-word names are not allowed if one of the words is a definite article (the), indefinite article (a or an), pronoun (like my), or preposition (for, to, or of). For example, your name should not be a bicycle, an espresso, to amuse or for fun.
• We suggest staying away from using initials in your invocation name. The voice assistants have a hard time processing initials, as most people do not say initials slowly enough. They also have a hard time processing acronyms. We suggest using words that are easy to pronounce and easy to remember.
• Specify a clear and easily recognized invocation name. Names must be easy to pronounce correctly and be phonetically distinct to avoid being misinterpreted as similar sounding words. Don't use names that are phonetically similar to vulgar, offensive, generic, or common names. Avoid hard to pronounce words. An invocation name that contains difficult words to pronounce, such as Quinoa, makes it harder for your users to pronounce correctly.
• Avoid words that are homophones. Try not to include words that sound the same as another word but have different meanings like "peak/peek" or "wait/weight". Also try to avoid overly clever word plays that will cause collisions with common English words or phrases.
• The invocation name should be distinctive to ensure users can enable your skill. Invocation names that are too generic may be rejected during the skill certification process or result in lower discoverability.
• If you want your invocation name to be the same on all voice platforms, you will want to make sure and choose a name that qualifies and is available on the voice platforms. We suggest you use the Check Availability feature before publishing to the platforms. Zammo is the only platform that allows you to check invocation name availability before submitting your app to the platforms for publishing.
• Do not use symbols in your invocation name (ampersands, colons, commas, etc.)

Alexa Specific Rules/Tips

• The invocation name must not contain any of the Alexa skill launch phrases and connecting words.
  1. Launch phrases include "run," "start," "play," "resume," "use," "launch," "ask," "open," "tell," "load," "begin," and "enable."
  2. Connecting words include "to," "from," "in," "using," "with," "about," "for," "that," "by," "if," "and," "whether."
• The invocation name must not contain the wake words "Alexa," "Amazon," "Echo," or the words "skill" or "app".
• The invocation name must contain only lower-case alphabetic characters, spaces between words, and possessive apostrophes (for example, "sam's science trivia"). Other characters like numbers must be spelled out (for example, "twenty one").