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Aaron Parecki

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#alexa

  • HTD Hybrid Wireless Whole House Audio System (www.htd.com)
    Sat, Oct 6, 2018 11:26am -07:00 #homeautomation #alexa
  • Indicate Device State with LEDs | Alexa Voice Service (developer.amazon.com)
    Sun, Sep 30, 2018 9:05pm -07:00 #alexa #homeautomation
  • It's too easy to trick your Echo into spying on you (www.engadget.com)
    Fri, Jun 1, 2018 2:08pm -07:00 #alexa
  • Use Echo speakers to send announcements around your home (www.engadget.com)
    Thu, Apr 5, 2018 12:18pm -07:00 #alexa
  • Amazon’s fix for creepy laughing Alexa reports will disable the ‘Alexa, laugh’ phrase - The Verge (www.theverge.com)
    Wed, Mar 7, 2018 5:50pm -08:00 #alexa
  • A Sleeping Alexa Can Listen for More Than Just Her Name - IEEE Spectrum (www.spectrum.ieee.org)
    Fri, Feb 9, 2018 11:12am -08:00 #alexa
  • Build Smart Home Skills for Cooking Appliances | Alexa Smart Home (developer.amazon.com)
    Fri, Jan 5, 2018 9:34am -08:00 #alexa #barbot
  • I turned a Furby into an Amazon Echo. Introducing: Furlexa (howchoo.com)
    Wed, Nov 29, 2017 8:27am -08:00 #electronics #furby #alexa #amazon #echo #hacking
  • Amazon Key is a new service that lets couriers unlock your front door - The Verge (www.theverge.com)
    Wed, Oct 25, 2017 7:02am -07:00 #amazon #alexa
  • Amazon Alexa Team
    Aaron Parecki
    I've been really enjoying the Flash Briefing in the mornings, but I have a request. There are several feeds which don't update as often as others (some update multiple times a day, some every few days). When I'm listening to the news in the morning, it's incredibly frustrating to hear a duplicate of what I heard the previous day. However right now my only option is to tell Alexa to skip that item, or just remove it from the list.

    I would prefer if Alexa could keep track of whether she's already played a particular item, and quietly skip over it if there is nothing new in that particular feed. This would make the experience much better, and I'd be able to add a lot more flash briefing sources without worrying about hearing old content!
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    Thu, Jul 27, 2017 5:42pm -07:00 #alexa #amazon
  • XKCD http://xkcd.com/

    Listening

    permalink (reposted on Thu, Mar 9, 2017 9:50am -08:00) #alexa
  • Aaron Parecki
    I've grown so accustomed to saying "Alexa" but I really want to change this to "Computer" so I can feel like I live in Star Trek
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    14 likes 1 repost 1 reply
    Mon, Jan 23, 2017 3:54pm -08:00 #alexa
  • TV anchor says live on-air 'Alexa, order me a dollhouse' – guess what happens next • The Register (www.theregister.co.uk)
    Fri, Jan 6, 2017 10:03pm -08:00 #alexa #internetofshit
  • Week in Review #100DaysOfIndieWeb

    aaronparecki.comDay 11: I dropped the web font in favor of a handful of system fonts for various platforms.Day 13: I added support for drawing curved maps lines to Atlas, which I use to generate the maps on my site. Now my travel plans show a nice line for each flight leg.Day 16: I improved the display of comments on my posts, including displaying some basic HTML formatting from comments, autolinking comment text, and showing images.
    continue reading...
    Fri, Jan 6, 2017 11:39am -08:00 #100daysofindieweb #indieweb #quill #p3k #ownyourgram #alexa #teacup
  • Day 14: Posting to my Website from Alexa #100DaysOfIndieWeb

    If you know me, you probably know that I log everything I eat and drink and post it to my website. A couple years ago, I wrote a small Pebble app that allowed me to quickly post common food and drink from my watch! Coincidentally around the time Pebble announced that FitBit had acquired their assets, my Pebble stopped working completely. This meant I no longer had a quick way to log food, and have to pull out my phone again to make log entries.This afternoon, Tantek suggested that I use my Amazon Alexa to post food and drink to my website instead! Of course this will only work when I'm at home, but it turns out that I'm home a lot of the time I'm eating and drinking. I also eat tacos every day, so it'd be great not to have to get out my phone during breakfast.So today, I launched Alexa integration for Teacup, the app I use to track my food.This was quite a challenging project given all the moving parts involved. I started by defining the voice interface I wanted to use. Interaction ModelVoice interactions for Alexa apps have to follow a pretty strict structure. Alexa doesn't support interpreting fully unstructured text, so app developers have to define patterns that Alexa can match on. Invoking any Alexa app involves first speaking the trigger word, followed by a keyword such as "ask" or "tell" followed by the app name, and then the pattern of text the app wants to match. So for Teacup, this results in speaking sentences such as:"Alexa, tell Teacup I drank coffee""Alexa, tell Teacup I ate tacos"This gets turned into what Amazon calls the "Interaction Model", and is a list of "slots" along with corresponding keywords for each slot, as well as writing out some sample sentences.LIST_OF_ACTIONS = ate | drankLIST_OF_FOOD = Coffee | Cocktail | Beer | Tacos | Mac and Cheese | ...Sample utterances:"I {Action} {Food}""I {Action} a {Food}"It isn't clear to me whether the list of keywords I provided is the complete set, because while I was testing, it managed to post the word "on" for the food, which is not in my list.AuthenticationThe next challenge was linking user accounts between Amazon users and Teacup users. Amazon provides great documentation on this, and thankfully it's all based on OAuth 2.0 rather than having made up some other model themselves. Essentially, the Amazon Alexa app on your phone acts as an OAuth 2.0 client, and you have to build an OAuth 2.0 server into your app that it works against. This is a pretty clever solution actually. Luckily, I'm pretty familiar with OAuth 2.0, so I was able to build this out pretty quickly.One thing struck me about Amazon's recommendations about building OAuth support in your app. They say that they'll launch your authorization URL from inside the iOS app, which is a known antipattern for apps in general. In Amazon's docs, it says "The user logs in using their normal credentials for your site." This is a really bad idea. You never want to train your users to enter their passwords into random apps. This is the whole reason we have OAuth in the first place!
    continue reading...
    5 likes 2 reposts 1 bookmark 1 reply 4 mentions
    Tue, Jan 3, 2017 5:23pm -08:00 #100daysofindieweb #indieweb #teacup #alexa #100daysofcode
  • Aaron Parecki
    Pretty impressed that Amazon basically tells you build an #OAuth2 server without actually saying it explicitly https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/docs/linking-an-alexa-user-with-a-user-in-your-system#how-account-linking-works
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    5 likes 2 reposts
    Tue, Jan 3, 2017 1:27pm -08:00 #alexa
  • Steps to Create a Flash Briefing Skill - Amazon Apps & Services Developer Portal (developer.amazon.com)
    Mon, Dec 26, 2016 1:18pm -08:00 #alexa #echo
  • Alexa Skill Testing Tool - Echosim.io (echosim.io)
    Mon, Dec 26, 2016 1:15pm -08:00 #alexa #echo
  • https://twitter.com/tayhatmaker/status/786222356918185984
    Aaron Parecki
    @tayhatmaker mostly timers and controlling lights. https://aaronparecki.com/2015/06/23/5/echo
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    1 like
    Wed, Oct 12, 2016 8:13am -07:00 #alexa
  • The Internet of Stings

    Portland, Oregon
    Sun, Apr 3, 2016 11:09am +00:00 (liked on Wed, Jun 1, 2016 3:16pm -07:00) #ebay #fitbit #firesheep #healthkit #alexa #steam #location #airbnb #grindr #blockchain #siri #surveillance #internet of things #hacking #quantified self #humour #music #sting
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Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki, Director of Identity Standards at Okta, and co-founder of IndieWebCamp. I maintain oauth.net, write and consult about OAuth, and participate in the OAuth Working Group at the IETF. I also help people learn about video production and livestreaming. (detailed bio)

I've been tracking my location since 2008 and I wrote 100 songs in 100 days. I've spoken at conferences around the world about owning your data, OAuth, quantified self, and explained why R is a vowel. Read more.

  • Director of Identity Standards at Okta
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  • OpenID Board Member

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