It should be working in the UK now.

Only that that's all I've had time to do so far. What alternative did you have in mind?

Any; from my experience developing voice UIs using Google products and APIs I figured it was a very good thing to segregate the application logic from its integration with select platform(s) like Google Actions, Alexa skill, Android Things, a standalone device, or one of many 3rd party chat application like Facebook Messenger or Hangouts Chat...

There are so many options it seems like the right thing to do is to release on those your potential users have access to.

Thanks for trying it. I don't see any errors from today on my end. Would you mind emailing me at adrian@patter.io to debug?

Hmm sorry. Where abouts are you? I didn't intentionally put on any restrictions.

Canada

Made a new version and submitted it for review. If all goes well, it should be working in a day or two. Let me know how it goes.

Oh man, def not intentional. I'm Canadian too.

Thanks!

Its strange that Amazon did this, because its clearly not because of licencing (you didn't restrict it). Although this does happen quite frequently for me, mostly when clicking links on reddit (streamable for the win)

I ranted about this in the unofficial Alexa Slack team and the people there gave some plausible (but unsatisfying) reasons why it works like that. I'm not a huge fan of Amazon though, so I'm happy to blame them. Essentially it boils down to different regions being treated as different "languages" as well as having features rolled out to them at different rates.

Should be working now.

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.

Make it available in India. I'd like to test and provide feedback.

India, Canada, the UK, and other English-speaking countries are in Amazon's review process. Should be working in another day or two.

It should be working now.

that's what I thought I must have a look at how you create a skill

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.

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.

It's closed source. Sorry. I've thought about things like trying to crowdsource the summaries, since people sometimes write "tl;dr" comments on posts.

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.

Thanks!

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 summarization API, supplement it with manual summaries, and/or train my own summarization model.

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.

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.

Might have to try google home.

As an aside, did you hit 100 enables yet? If so, congrats on the free dot :)

I.... don't know. But I doubt it :)