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.
Okay, now the links…
Skillz to try
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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)
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Hardcore History Alexa Skill – if you don’ already love Dan Carlin’s fantastic podcast, now it’s an Alexa skill
Thingz to read
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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.
And finally, here is a graph of current Alexa uses. Buying something on Amazon Prime is the least cited use.