Wednesday, July 12, 2017

While Awaiting Delivery of my Echo Dot* ...

... I decided to look into creating "skills" for Amazon's line of voice-controlled devices (e.g. "Hey, Alexa, play the Grateful Dead channel on Amazon Music").

Took about 10 minutes to create my first skill, which is awaiting certification now. If it is accepted, people will be able to add Rational Review News Digest to their news/"flash briefing" options. That is, when they say "Alexa, what's the news?" or "Alexa, what's my Flash briefing?" the device's pleasant female voice will read the most recent items from RRND's RSS feed to them.

I'm not sure there's any point in doing the same thing with KN@PPSTER proper (this blog). What do you think? I am going to see if it's easy to put The KN@PP Stir Podcast available as a "skill" (it's already available over those devices indirectly, via TuneIn).

* Yes, my only Amazon Prime Day purchase was an Echo Dot. The sale price was several dollars less than their best regular price (that you had to buy a 3-pack to get), and I also got a $10 credit with Amazon as a bonus for placing my first "voice order" using Alexa (on my Fire TV stick).

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