An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python
developer.amazon.com
developer.amazon.com
We are building an open-source and 100% private-by-design Voice AI platform, and you can code your first private assistant in less than 1h: https://medium.com/snips-ai/building-a-voice-controlled-home...
The true crypto use case - raising money without consequences. A shitty use case, but one none the less.
I do agree, however, that the ICO makes the whole thing feel scammy. It's a terrible idea, I guess they got lured in by the promise of free money and shoehorned a token into their app.
I thought of buying the hardware to make the Snips device (to support the company financially as well), but I realized that I use my Echo mostly for Spotify (as it's a bit too crippled to use for much else), which Snips wouldn't be able to support.
I still might get/build one for all the home automation I can't use the Echo for, but a big use case is immediately removed if it can't play Spotify.
There is still no way for a skill to read notifications. For example - I want to write a calendar notification app which unifies all calendar events across several sources and there is just no way to do it. It is of course disabled in the name of privacy which I can understand - but I don't understand how I can't enable this for a device that I own from an app I write.
Similarly - I was considering getting an Echo Show for keeping a persistent view of my todo list and upcoming things on Echo show. I looked at writing skills for Echo show. Something that should be a webapp that just renders a particular source or something similar. But nope - It just looks hard or impossible.
My primary use case was going to be watching Netflix with voice control. Netflix has yet to appear on the Show, and because of Amazon’s zealot like insistence that everything be driven by a voice UI there’s no web browser or app support. The thing is clearly running some version of Android, I wish they’d just bite the bullet and throw FireOS proper on there.
I really hope Snips catches on, as it's much, much more hackable.
https://flask-assistant.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quick_start...
0: https://github.com/ssaamm/pun-generator/compare/24188aceb3da...
[0] https://github.com/alexa-labs/alexa-skills-kit-sdk-for-pytho...
And the Smart Home skill APIs are very different from the normal skills, so most of the tutorials that are available don't help much.
Lambda is required as a back-end for Smart Home skills, but must still be set up manually which means copying and pasting things back and forth between completely unrelated management interfaces, some on AWS, some on Amazon Developer Services.
User authentication is required for Smart Home skills, but after checking the configuration very carefully and still seeing the auth step fail in the Alexa app even though the OAUTH calls succeeded, with little to no visibility into why it failed, I stopped wasting time on it.
EDIT: woops... maybe you can? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46329464/can-an-aws-lamb...
For ?? I've tried just making the lambda directly connect to an open port, but this requires me to open the router to quite a large range since lambdas don't have static IPs.
I'd like a VPN in ?? I have that for my phone.
As I dig into VPC and such it seems like it almost requires an EC2 endpoint for me to VPN into from my network which will NAT the request?
I'd like to not have to pay for an EC2 instance.
Once you have your lambda running inside a VPC, you can assign an elastic IP to the VPC. You don't need an EC2 instance, but you will need a NAT gateway, which is billed at similar levels to a small EC2 instance anyway.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-ip-ranges....
If you keep slapping away developers on one end, then don't expect us to get excited about building things for your products on the other end.