Category: Amazon
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Activity Book: An Alexa skill for bored kids
Do you have an Amazon Alexa-enabled device? Do you have children? Are those children ever bored? If your answers were “yes,” “yes,” and “yes of course all the time,” then do I have an Alexa skill for you! It’s called Activity Book. Enable the skill in your Alexa app (or by saying, “Alexa, enable the…
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Alexa, start a new post called, “I’m blogging this with my voice.”
I’ve written and published an Alexa skill that lets you check your blog notifications, moderate comments, and start new draft posts on your WordPress.com or Jetpack-enabled blog, all by speaking to any Alexa-enabled device. The skill is called “Blog Helper“; you’ll find it in the Skills section of your Alexa app or by saying, “Alexa,…
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“Alexa, just play along with the joke.”
One of the biggest complaints in the Alexa skill development community is that the language required to invoke a third-party skill is so stilted. Instead of being able to say, “Alexa, what’s the temperature outside?”, you have to say something like, “Alexa, ask WeatherBot 3000 what the temperature is outside.” It adds a gatekeeper layer;…
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I wrote my first Alexa skill… almost.
I wrote my first skill for Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices. (A “skill” is a way to add functionality to Alexa; other platforms would call it an add-on, plugin, or extension.) It was supposed to be a way for your kids to find things to do when they’re bored. Here’s how my blog post about it was…
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College: Post-It Notes and Scotch
Note to self: possible autobiography title?
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Amazon to compete with Twitter?
Noticed this morning that Amazon.com added a feature that puts them squarely in competition with Twitter: This is bad news for Twitter. Up until now, they’ve been the market leader in the “Popular websites that are unavailable” category, but with Amazon.com as competition, they’ll have a hard time keeping that position.