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Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

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Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#13

Post by serg_chernata »

adrianbg wrote: post #10
serg_chernata wrote: post #9

Can you share any more details about the tech you're using? Libraries, languages, services?

Alexa does most of the hard stuff: speech recognition / intent detection, and speech synthesis. My back end is a simple Python service on GCP that handles HTTP requests from Alexa. The same service also downloads the HN front page from the FireBase mirror and gets summaries from this API: https://rapidapi.com/textanalysis/api/Text%20Summarization It's not perfect though, so I may switch to a more expensive summarizat…

Thank you, I didn't know Alexa handled all of that.

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#14

Post by adrianbg »

discussedbefore wrote: post #12

Interesting to compare the automation vs. a manual approach started last month. Show HN: Hacker Daily, a daily podcast for Hacker News readers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16850689

Yeah.. turns out that's actually a friend of a friend. I'm curious to see what people prefer for obvious reasons :). The advantages of my approach are personalization, interactivity, and scalability beyond just HN. Theirs is probably going to be a nicer experience than I can do for non-interactive use.

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#15

Post by adrianbg »

serg_chernata wrote: post #13
adrianbg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alexa does most of the hard stuff: speech recognition / intent detection, and speech synthesis. My back end is a simple Python service on GCP that handles HTTP requests from Alexa. The same service also downloads the HN front page from the FireBase mirror and gets summaries from this API: https://rapidapi.com/textanalysis/api/Text%20Summarization It's not perfect though, so I may switch to a more expensive summarizat…

Thank you, I didn't know Alexa handled all of that.

Sometimes I wish it didn't. They don't give you the original audio, any kind of confidence score, or even alternative hypotheses. It's really a pretty rigid platform. A lot of things that seem like they should be reasonable are impossible. Eg., I'd prefer to just say a list of post titles and let people interrupt Alexa when they hear something they like. That is impossible right now without pretty serious hacks.

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#18

Post by dguo »

sjwalter wrote: post #5

This is deadly. Would love if you could feed it custom sources or maybe something like RSS feeds, so I could just "Hey alexa can tell me the top three stories from my feed" or something. No clue if that's possible. Good stuff!

Alexa has a feature called Flash Briefing: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/flashbriefing/understand-t...

I looked into developing one last week, but as far as I can tell, you can't programatically manipulate the feed in any way. You just give it a RSS feed, and it reads the first five results.

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#19

Post by adrianbg »

dguo wrote: post #18
sjwalter wrote: post #5

This is deadly. Would love if you could feed it custom sources or maybe something like RSS feeds, so I could just "Hey alexa can tell me the top three stories from my feed" or something. No clue if that's possible. Good stuff!

Alexa has a feature called Flash Briefing: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/flashbriefing/understand-t... I looked into developing one last week, but as far as I can tell, you can't programatically manipulate the feed in any way. You just give it a RSS feed, and it reads the first five results.

Yeah, I don't think it's intended to be interactive. More like a really quick curated news update.
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