Interesting it looks like the uk and us versions of amazon have different skills availible
Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles
#22Interesting it looks like the uk and us versions of amazon have different skills availible
My guess would be that they have separate speech recognition / synthesis models. Sorry, I should try and get this thing out to other countries too.
Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yep. The rigidity creates issues though.
As a user: 1) The only thing I can really control is what sources are in my feed and the order. For example, I added NPR, but it reads out the entire story instead of just the titles. And the stories are so long that I removed NPR completely.
As a developer: 1) I tried creating a flash briefing for a particular subreddit, but the Alexa developer console said the feed could not be parsed even though I could open the feed just fine in Firefox. From what I could tell, the backend was being very strict with what constitutes a valid feed. If I could use code, I would just fetch the feed and parse it myself. Since I can't, it seems like there's nothing I can do.
2) I was also surprised to learn that existing skills can't serve as flash briefing sources. It'd be great if I could add your HN skill to my briefings, but as I understand it, you'd have to create/host a RSS feed and then create yet another skill that is just a flash briefing one.
Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I don't think it's intended to be interactive. More like a really quick curated news update.
Yep. The rigidity creates issues though. As a user: 1) The only thing I can really control is what sources are in my feed and the order. For example, I added NPR, but it reads out the entire story instead of just the titles. And the stories are so long that I removed NPR completely. As a developer: 1) I tried creating a flash briefing for a particular subreddit, but the Alexa developer console said the feed could not…
I find Amazon's products often have bizarre constraints like that. They seem to do well anyway though :/
Thanks for your comments! I wonder if I can create some kind of personalized briefing based on which stories people seem interested in.
Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles
#25Interesting it looks like the uk and us versions of amazon have different skills availible
My guess would be that they have separate speech recognition / synthesis models. Sorry, I should try and get this thing out to other countries too.
that's what I thought I must have a look at how you create a skill
Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where are you located?
SF
We have integrated Alexa with our RFID Sensor tag and reader infrastructure.
We place sensor tags in an environment and then ask Alexa "whats wrong" and she will reply with any events the infra has.
We have some other neat things we did with it...
Ill ping you off HN - we are also in SF-Bay.
Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles
#27How do you generate the summaries?
Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, I was working on an Alexa skill once where I wanted the user to be able to say anything. That isn’t possible really, unless you give Alexa a really long randomly generated list of un-related/non-existent words for the “intent”, so that when Alexa tries to parse what the user says to those words, it fails and just provides its next best guess.
Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, I was working on an Alexa skill once where I wanted the user to be able to say anything. That isn’t possible really, unless you give Alexa a really long randomly generated list of un-related/non-existent words for the “intent”, so that when Alexa tries to parse what the user says to those words, it fails and just provides its next best guess.
Google's speech recognition is supposed to be much better, though not sure if they'd allow "one intent to rule them all" like you want.
For free-form speech recognition in Alexa, the best option I've seen mentioned on the public Alexa Slack team is using the "SearchQuery" slot. So you'd still have to make a weird catch-all intent that would eat up some of the words (and you wouldn't be able to see them). At the same time, you shouldn't assume that Alexa will give you very good results with such loose constraints. Even in my simple skill it's very bad about confusing certain pairs of words.
Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles
#30"You are not eligible to enable this skill due to geographical restrictions."
:( This is super useful, would love to install it!