A little while ago the Alexa team updated the Alexa Presentation Layer from v1 to v1.1 and with it brought a large range of updates to their components, commands and capabilities. Now APL already allowed you to make some pretty stunning visual accompaniments. but the new version goes a step… Read more »
Okay, so you’ve survived your application’s monolith phase. But it left you jarred and cynical. You understand that by breaking this monstrosity down into smaller services it should be more maintainable, easier to change, faster to innovate. Microservice all the things! And it makes sense, it’s good. You have all… Read more »
Non-tech post, feel free to skip it. I’ve had two conversations with people recently that have meant me talking about my job. Not bad conversations, not important ones, but they’ve been working away in the back there trying to figure something out. The first conversation was with an old colleague… Read more »
When you work in technology, if you asked a random sampling of people if they normally felt very confident they’d say “no”. When you ask a question like that confidence is always seen as a social attribute, synonymous with extravert. If you asked the same group of people if their… Read more »
Yes, this is a personal post, and I’m trying to get across ideas I’m not hugely comfortable talking about. You’ve been warned and feel free to ignore it and wait until the next Alexa post. So, a little context So yeah, I’m an introvert, if you look up the definition… Read more »
Using the new Alexa Presentation Language in .NET Core with Alexa.NET
Alexa.NET Polly SupportAlexa.NET.APL v.15A dash of Riker Ipsum for good measure Everything below this line is a small reflection on how I got here – you don’t have to read it. I was looking at my GitHub and NuGet profiles this morning and as of the recent APL support and… Read more »
So you have your skill, everything’s deployed and sounds fantastic and your users are happy. How often does a blog article start with that? But that’s where we need to start in this article. Your skill is beautifully crafted, and when a user comes back it picks one of two… Read more »
Amazon have been super busy recently, and one of the most exciting announcements for me to be able to look into has been the ability to have in-skill purchasing. What this means is that your skill can now ask a user to make a purchase without ever leaving the echo… Read more »
Amazon have released a fabulous new update to the way Alexa works. If a user makes a request without a skill name and Alexa can’t handle it, machine learning kicks in and some of the most likely skills to handle it are sent a new kind of request asking if… Read more »