Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

Hi Everybody!

For the last month I've been working on a Flask extension called Flask-Ask I want to plug. The "Ask" part stands for the "Alexa Skills Kit", which is the service behind the Amazon Echo family of devices.

https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-ask

I've used a lot of web frameworks, and I love Flask! The Alexa Skills Kit is based on its own Request/Response model built in JSON on top of REST, so it made sense to incorporate mitsuhiko's architectural patterns like decorator-based routing, context locals, and templates, and adapt them for Flask-Ask.

I put up a 5-min tutorial for Flask-Ask here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC2zi4WIFX0

You can develop without an Echo Device using Amazon's Echosim service: https://echosim.io/

Thanks!

View on HN

Awesome! Thank you so much for this :) I've been experimenting with using Echo for home automation (mainly TV/Logitech Harmony related stuff) and this is really, really cool for that. A tangent: Siri on the AppleTV 4th gen was pretty cool until I got Echo - now having to have that remote and press a button seems archaic. Apple and Google will definitely release something similar soon.

Thank you. I experienced the same feelings. It's interesting how eliminating the extra button press makes the technology not 20% more useful, but maybe 10x more useful (IMO).

There are constraints. For example, the Alexa service can't do dictation, so building certain types of applications doesn't make sense.

But, after experiencing the Echo, it's hard to imagine a future without this type of computing - where you speak a sentence and it maps to a function carried out on a server. It's a very natural and fun way to get things done.

I really find it creepy. Sounds like a possibility of total surveillance.

Clever use of flask & ngrok was news to me too. Thanks.

I can imagine asking alexa "whats the best 2 man tent on the wirecutter; order it for me, delivered to work by Friday"* Do you think the technology will get there anytime soon?

*other review sites are available

Bah no API! https://mobile.twitter.com/wirecutter/status/532929880665890...

I was going to try and dazzle you.

I don't think Amazon provides a hook to do orders (although you can reorder past purchases on Echo through Amazon), and I don't know if they have a checkout type api orders could be routed to externally.

Good idea for a skill. One potential issue is the products would be limited to a vocabulary of around 50000 items because of the way the NLP works (custom slot type), so it might work best for product niches.

Good work on the lib. I think EchoSim is provided by iQuarius media and not Amazon.

Thank you! Thank you for the correction with iQuarius Media too!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com