WeChat ID
aaronpk_tv
#alexa
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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! -
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
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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... -
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... -
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
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Steps to Create a Flash Briefing Skill - Amazon Apps & Services Developer Portal (developer.amazon.com)
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@tayhatmaker mostly timers and controlling lights. https://aaronparecki.com/2015/06/23/5/echo
