I used to blog more about the challenges of building skills – and how to make it easier for skills to be discovered by folks once you launch them. Here’s a nice piece about skill discovery from voicebot.ai, along with this excerpt:

Zevenbergen’s good fortune to rise to the top of the search results for “What’s my horoscope?” would not be wasted. He had already built user retention elements into his Google Action. First, Zevenbergen wanted to fulfill the intent of the user very efficiently. He had a goal of giving the horoscope as quickly as possible. For new users that simply required determining their birthday. Not only was there a target of delivering the full horoscope within 10 seconds, the Action tells new users that they will receive their horoscope within 10 seconds. It sets expectations and removes a potential concern about how much the user may be committing to with this particular voice experience.

Second, he found that shorter, more concise horoscopes were leading to more completed sessions. There may be an opportunity to convey many paragraphs worth of horoscope goodness but that’s often the opposite of what people want when interacting on a smart speaker. They want the facts. Ensuring users heard the entire horoscope before abandoning the session also gave him a captive audience that was still around when the Action offered to add “What’s my zodiac sign” to a routine or notification. “What’s my zodiac sign” is now getting about 5,000 opened notifications from Google Assistant each day. If you compare that to the DAUs for the Action you will conclude that nearly 85% of daily user sessions are driven by this single technique.