Get location from Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.