I missed last week, so shorter format this week. All the links, but first:

Community member of the week: @amit, Alexa Voice Services evangelist at Amazon helped me better understand the Alexa skills approval process. Also, pretty sweet twitter handle.

Something new I learned this week: (related to the above): I’m building a skill which was intended to have a one word invocation. Amazon does allow this in special circumstances, but in those cases they need to specifically train Alexa on that word. I assume this is why at first, when I asked Alexa to “order me an Uber” it actually added “Hoover” to my shopping list. But a week later, asked if I was trying to enable the “Uber” skill. 

> Song Genius - “Alexa, ask Song Genius for the lyrics to the Chainsmoker song Closer” (real example from the reviews, which were obviously written by people who listen to cooler music than I do)
> Hardcore History Alexa Skill – if you don’ already love Dan Carlin’s fantastic podcast, now it’s an Alexa skill

> Johnny Walker Skill – your amazon echo can now teach you a thing or two about whisky
> Skills.wtf - @bentossel made a thing! It’s a site to find all the best Alexa Skills
> Mylestone - lets you access memories through your voice

For developerz
> Voco - Adobe releases a photoshop for voice
> Test your voice app idea in less than an hour - note this is a medium post, not software :(  but the post pointed me to…
> Say Wizard - this is a quick command line tool to use the ‘Say’ library on the Mac OS which is pretty neat

> Amazon Voice ID - Amazon is building a feature to distinguish between individual users based on their voices, this could up a number of use cases around security. I learned about this from an awesome group of people who got together at google to talk VUIs so jointly crediting @naomak, @markcwebster, @thatjillian, @seejohnrun, @sevenofnan, Stu Porter, & Lexi Green.

>Skate to where the voice is going– Lightspeed Venture Partners
> The ultimate guide to voice assistants - also by @bentossell
> AlexasShelf - a newsletter with curated alexa skills, via @zabimaru_ichigo. The market of voice app focused newsletters just doubled
> Power of Audio - Spotify did a nice piece on how they’re thinking about audio and brands. Thanks @courtneynel from BDMI fund for pointing this one out
> Amazon wants Alexa to answer customer service calls 
> Voysis raises $8m to become the twilio of voice AI 
> Alexa, can you help with this murder case? - Amazon pushes back on prosecutor’s request. Unclear to me that they even have relevant data stored in the Alexa unless the wake word was spoken.
> Voice-Computing needs a killer app - by peter rojas

And finally, here is a graph of current Alexa uses. Buying something on Amazon Prime is the least cited use.

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Have a great weekend!

- Matt