My Media for Alexa and Amazon's Alexa+ Route Hijacking

The Good Old Days

My Media for Alexa started in 2018 a few years after the Alexa ecosystem started. At that time, the Alexa skill model was reasonably predictable and based on the concept of 'Intents'. As a skill developer, you define a series of different 'intents' that you want your skill to perform and for each one, create a set of example phrases that Alexa can use to direct a user to a given intent for your skill.

We define two broad categories of intent:

• Launch intents
• Other intents

"Launch intents" are ways of invoking a skill an Alexa device, eg "Alexa, open My Media". "Other intents" are one-shot actions that perform something within your Skill, eg "Alexa, ask My Media to play the album 'Dark side of the moon'".

What changed with Alexa+ - "Route Hijacking"

Whilst not perfect, for 8 years, Amazon has correctly routed both Launch and Other intents to our skill. However, in the past 6 months, with the introduction of Alexa+, we, and other Amazon Skill Developers, have noticed that "Other intents", in particular, are massively deprioritized within Amazon's Alexa routing rules.

This means that whilst users can typically launch the My Media skill ("Alexa, Open My Media"), invoking more complicated one-shot actions like opening My Media to play a playlist fail and instead the request gets hijacked by Amazon and routed to Amazon Music or Spotify, even though they are using "My Media" in the invocation.

The skill launch phrase remains largely durable, however, adding in "Skill" to the end of the Open Request definitely makes it more reliable, eg:

"Alexa, Open My Media Skill"

This is still one of the most used intents with the My Media skill as it defaults to playing your whole music collection. Alternatively, some users have used the option within the My Media server settings to change the default playlist to something more specific. Then "Alexa, Open My Media Skill" can launch a specific playlist which has been a useful building block in some user's Alexa Routines.

However, the progressive and worsening routing of "Other Intent" by Amazon has made My Media for Alexa become harder and more frustrating to use as most users want to play specific playlists and albums instead of the "play everything" option enabled by the Launch phrase. We escalated the route hijacking to Amazon who analyzed sample user sessions and confirmed it is a bug Amazon side and not in our skill. They have proposed a 2026Q3 fix timeframe, however, offer no guarantees.

In case it isn't obvious, we are EXTREMELY upset by how the invocation models have been disrupted by Alexa+ and apologies unreservedly to our users on disruption as a result - hopefully you can see that this is an Amazon side bug (which Amazon have confirmed themselves) and we are working furiously to find a solution.....

A Solution - ARH - "Anti-Route Hijacking"

To workaround the routing issue, we have tested leveraging another feature of Alexa skills - multi-turn dialog sessions. To date, My Media has used 'single-shot' requests which require the user to say a single phrase to do something, eg play an album or a playlist. That phrase had to contain the words "Alexa, ask My Media" to ensure Alexa would route the request to our skill.

However, there's an alternative model available within Alexa, that allows a skill dialog session to be started and left open. Once a skill session is open, if a user says subsequent phrases to Alexa, they are interpreted within the same dialog session. These follow up phrases seem less prone to route-hijacking by Amazon, even with Alexa+, because once the skill launch phrase is heard, Alexa enters the skill session and stays in it until the session times out or is cancelled by the user.

This opens up an alternative interaction model option for My Media. Instead of single shot phrases, we can introduction a short dialog like:

User: Alexa, open My Media Skill
Alexa: What would you like My Media to play?
User: The album "Dark side of the moon"
Alexa: Playing "Dark side of the Moon" from your My Media collection

We will call this model the My Media ARH Model (ARH = Anti-Route Hijacking).

In our testing, this is stable even on Alexa+ and remains largely user friendly, although we still appreciate the attraction of single-shot requests that were supported previously

The Downside

There are two downsides of the alternative interaction model:

It requires two requests to play music instead of one

Whilst a downside, we think most users can live with this in order to leverage My Media again until Amazon fix the routing issue.

It breaks any routines which rely on invoking 'Alexa, Open My Media' to play their entire collection or a specific playlist

Many users have linked My Media to Alexa routines in order to play either their entire music collection when a given routine trigger happens, or a specific playlist by changing the 'Default Playlist' defined within the My Media for Alexa server settings.

If we change the phrase "Alexa, Open My Media (skill)" to start a session and ask the user what to play, these routines will break as the routines cannot answer the dialog correctly.

The Compromise

The My Media team have reviewed the options available and propose the following phasing:

Step 1 - My Media ARH Model for New My Media Installs and Opt-In of Existing Installs

In this phrase, existing users will not be automatically migrated to use the new ARH invocation model. New Media Clients will automatically be set to use the ARH invocation model.

Therefore existing routines will not be impacted, however, if you will likely struggle using My Media with Alexa+. If you want to opt-in to use My Media ARH Model, either send us an email or alternatively follow these steps to self-opt in:

1. Open the My Media web console
2. Go to the "Settings" tab
3. Click the "Network" sub-tab
4. Find the "Media Server Label" field
5. Append a '+' character to end of your server name, and press 'Set'

AVAILABILITY: NOW 19 JUNE 2026

Step 2 - Dedicated Alexa Routine Tasks for My Media

We have already updated the My Media skill to support so-called 'Routine Tasks'. This update is with Amazon for certification. Once this is approved, instead of using the generic "Alexa, Open My Media Skill" invocation within a Routine, you will be able to specify more granular paremterized tasks for My Media to invoke in routines.

We are implementing two Routine Tasks:

Step 3 - My Media Server App update to prompt users to use the My Media ARH Model

We will shortly provide an update to the My Media Server App which will prompt users to choose between the two invocation models. How this is presented to users will depend on whether Amazon resolves the hijacking issue. If they do resolve it, we will likely leave the choice of invocation model to the user. However, if they don't resolve it, we will steer users who are using Alexa+ to use the ARH interaction model whereas Alexa (non+) users can use either.

Feedback

As always, please email us at support [at] mymediaalexa.com with any feedback on the above and also feedback to how you find the new ARH interaction model.