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I'm looking for a way to get the user's location, ideally longitude/latitude but address would work too, from the Alexa Skill Kit request to my custom skill. Also, I don't want to have to have the user link to an account on my app's side.
Is this possible? If so, how?
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Alexa uses your location to make accurate weather forecasts, amongst other things. So, if you've moved recently, it's especially important to make sure your address is up to date. To change your location, you'll have to open the Alexa app on your iPhone, iPad, or Android.
Open the Amazon Alexa app on your smartphone. In the menu, tap Skills & Games. Tap the search icon in the upper right hand corner and in the search field, type in Tractive GPS. Select the Tractive GPS skill and then Enable to use.
Go to Manage Your Content and Devices page and select the Devices tab. Select the lost or stolen device. Click Edit next to the device name, and copy its serial number to provide to Customer Service. Click Deregister and follow the instructions.
Amazon has now (2017-04-05) added this capability. See their blog post about their new Device Address API.
Using this new API you can get the address (either postal code or full address) of the device, as specified in the customer’s device settings.
From that you could use a geocoding API (such as is part of the Google Maps API) to translate the address into location coordinates.
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As per this thread on the Amazon Developer forums, there is not currently (as of May 2016) a way to get user location via the publicly available APIs. The only skills able to do so, such as Uber or Domino's, are utilizing APIs that are not available through the Alexa Skills Kit. However, there's hope that it may be added, as "Jamie@Amazon" left this reply in that discussion:
Hey there,
Thanks for posting.
This has now been added to the roadmap. Thanks for the feedback.
Jamie
However, at the time of writing, no further update has been provided regarding the implementation of such a feature.
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