Speaker 1: Get in text with technology with tech Stuff from stuff
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey everyone, and welcome to Tech Stuff. I
Speaker 1: am your host, Jonathan Strickland. Today I am incredibly fortunate
Speaker 1: I have not one, but two amazing guests to talk
Speaker 1: about our topic of discussion today, which is really going
Speaker 1: to be about Amazon's Alexa service and what it can do,
Speaker 1: what what it's like to develop for it, and why
Speaker 1: should we be excited about these voice recognition services in general. Uh.
Speaker 1: I guarantee you by the end of this episode you'll
Speaker 1: be as excited about them as I already am. So
Speaker 1: let me introduce my guests. First, on the phone, I've
Speaker 1: got Dave Zbitski from Amazon High Dave, Hey, how you
Speaker 1: doing great? Thank you so much for joining me, really appreciated.
Speaker 1: And I here in the studio in the flesh. John
Speaker 1: Scheme from big nerd Ranch. Now, Josh, you've been working
Speaker 1: on developing sort of the the the how to guide
Speaker 1: of developing for Amazon's Alexa. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: I've been working with David and others in Amazon to
Speaker 1: build some developer education tools to write apps for the
Speaker 1: Alexa Skills Kit platform with Now, this is great. I'm
Speaker 1: glad that I've got two experts on the subject here
Speaker 1: because I do lots of research and I love to
Speaker 1: chat about technology, and I'm very passionate about the subject.
Speaker 1: But it's always a great thrill for me to have
Speaker 1: experts on the subject matter here as well, so that
Speaker 1: they can even fill in those gaps that are within
Speaker 1: my understanding, because I'm coming from a consumer standpoint primarily,
Speaker 1: I am not someone who has had a deep education
Speaker 1: in the field of coding and developing for this sort
Speaker 1: of stuff. I have a liberal arts degree, but I'm
Speaker 1: so glad to have you guys here to talk about.
Speaker 1: Let's start at the very top and work our way down.
Speaker 1: So Alexa is uh a kind of a personal assistant
Speaker 1: that can do lots of different stuff and depends heavily
Speaker 1: upon voice recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing. And I
Speaker 1: don't think a lot of people have a true understanding
Speaker 1: or appreciation of how big a deal that is that
Speaker 1: the way we humans communicate and the way that computers
Speaker 1: quote unquote think is very different. So, Dave, can you
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about the challenges of developing something
Speaker 1: that can actually work with natural language? Certainly, I um
Speaker 1: and and thank you for the intro. I uh, I
Speaker 1: love talking about technology too, and I am far from
Speaker 1: an expert. This has been a learning journey for me.
Speaker 1: There are people who have been working on voice and
Speaker 1: natural language and AI for thirty plus years, and I
Speaker 1: feel like we're in a see change now with the
Speaker 1: power of the cloud and just how affordable you know everybody, Um,
Speaker 1: you may have a tablet or you may have a
Speaker 1: smart home. Just that technology has become so affordable for
Speaker 1: everybody that we can finally do something like this. And
Speaker 1: Amazon's vision is basically the Star Trek computer. If everybody remembers,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter if it's you know, the Next Generation,
Speaker 1: the original series, Deep Space nine, any or the movies, right,
Speaker 1: there was always a voice that a human being could
Speaker 1: just call out to in the air. I remember watching
Speaker 1: Next Generation and uh wharf would go and play opera, right,
Speaker 1: klingon opera or Pricard would would ask for music just
Speaker 1: and they would walk in the room. And I was
Speaker 1: just thinking about that the other day walking into my office,
Speaker 1: I was like, gosh, I'm asking a computer to turn
Speaker 1: on the lights and play a piece of music. This
Speaker 1: is we are living in science fiction, right, And so
Speaker 1: that's the basic idea behind mind Alexa is it is
Speaker 1: a service from Amazon that we make available to anyone
Speaker 1: were free, and we've put it into actual pieces of
Speaker 1: hardware that we make and we sell to Amazon customers
Speaker 1: as well. And some of your listeners may know that
Speaker 1: as the Amazon Echo, the Dot, the tap, or the
Speaker 1: fire TV. And the basic premise is that Alexa can
Speaker 1: understand us as a human being, and then she can
Speaker 1: talk to all the technology in our lives so that
Speaker 1: we don't have to learn that user interface, you know,
Speaker 1: the whole twelve o'clock blinking light. How do I go
Speaker 1: ahead and change that. I should be able to just
Speaker 1: ask the device itself to set the time. I should
Speaker 1: not have to worry about that as a human being.
Speaker 1: And that's really what Alexa is all about. She can
Speaker 1: talk to human beings, she can understand human beings, and
Speaker 1: then she can go ahead and tell machines what we're
Speaker 1: actually asking for. The is really important to have that
Speaker 1: sort of translator between us and the machine world. One
Speaker 1: of the things that I found extremely frustrating early in
Speaker 1: the era of home automation is that it wasn't all
Speaker 1: or nothing kind of approach, depending upon what you wanted
Speaker 1: to do you had to essentially go with one provider
Speaker 1: for everything, one manufacturer for all of your stuff, because
Speaker 1: it wouldn't talk to each other. You have different protocols,
Speaker 1: you have different approaches to the way that they would
Speaker 1: integrate with each other. And if you had everything from
Speaker 1: one company, awesome, everything talks to each other, it's fantastic.
Speaker 1: But if you're like a regular human being who can't
Speaker 1: necessarily outfit an entire home all at once with the
Speaker 1: same sort of technologies, you wanted to be able to
Speaker 1: talk to each other. So I think one of the
Speaker 1: big in my mind, one of the big bonuses of
Speaker 1: an approach like Alexa is the idea that you have
Speaker 1: this go between that can do that work for you
Speaker 1: where it can start to compensate for the fact that
Speaker 1: these technologies don't natively talk to each other necessarily. Um. Right.
Speaker 1: A great thing about standards is there's so many of them, right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I love the fact that you know, the term standard
Speaker 1: means the opposite of what you could expect it to
Speaker 1: be and um and and that is one of the
Speaker 1: most popular uses we have seen for the the echo device.
Speaker 1: I know that was my journey too, is I started
Speaker 1: out you know. I used it for music and general queries,
Speaker 1: and I said, you know, I heard this thing can
Speaker 1: do stuff with smart home. I have no idea what
Speaker 1: smart home is. I have no idea what any of
Speaker 1: these terms like IoT right, internet things. It doesn't make
Speaker 1: sense to me. I want to light I can turn on.
Speaker 1: So I went to Amazon and I searched for smart
Speaker 1: light bulb I think is what I found, and it
Speaker 1: was I think it was fifteen bucks. I figured i'd
Speaker 1: order it and see if it would work. And there
Speaker 1: was you know, kind of a general instruction on Amazon site.
Speaker 1: But what you can actually do with Alexa as you
Speaker 1: get the device and you say, Alexa discover devices and
Speaker 1: then she figures out what you put into your home.
Speaker 1: You don't have to go and figure that out. And
Speaker 1: we've found enough custard demand that we've actually created. If
Speaker 1: you go to Amazon dot com slash smart Home, people
Speaker 1: can go there and they'll see all of the smart
Speaker 1: home devices that Alexa can just talk to and will
Speaker 1: automatically work. So it makes it a much easier process
Speaker 1: versus trying to figure out all the individual pieces to buy,
Speaker 1: who talks to who and everything that you mentioned. You
Speaker 1: can just go ahead and put a light screw in
Speaker 1: a light bulb and be able to talk to it. No,
Speaker 1: that's incredible from a consumer standpoint, right, the idea that
Speaker 1: you've made this sort of a seamless experience so that
Speaker 1: you don't have that frustrating moment where even with something
Speaker 1: as simple as bluetooth pairing, for some people that that
Speaker 1: is that is a barrier, right that they have to wait,
Speaker 1: do I have to on each device when the light
Speaker 1: is bling? Game? It means that what's happening, you know,
Speaker 1: just something as simple as that can be really frustrating
Speaker 1: for some people. So to take that step away, uh,
Speaker 1: is really really an ingenious and helpful thing to do. Now, Now, Josh,
Speaker 1: you've worked very hard to help with the back end
Speaker 1: of this so that people who are developing for Alexa
Speaker 1: can take advantage of this and and give people chance
Speaker 1: to make Alexa do some pretty incredible things. So, first
Speaker 1: of all, I gotta I gotta lay down some vocabulary.
Speaker 1: Right before we started recording, you talked about how a
Speaker 1: thing on your phone you refer to it as a skill,
Speaker 1: and you think all of us, because I'm so deep
Speaker 1: in this Amazon world, skills and acts. So so tell
Speaker 1: people what what exactly is an Alexa skill? Well, it's
Speaker 1: interesting skill the term you think initially a skill is
Speaker 1: something that you acquire or learn over time. And I
Speaker 1: believe that Amazon used that terminology as a nod towards
Speaker 1: really the machine learning aspect of what they offer in
Speaker 1: the cloud, right, um, which is and David was speaking
Speaker 1: to this a bit ago. Um, you know, the machine
Speaker 1: learning component of what the Amazon service offers, and that
Speaker 1: is the incredibly complex problem, right of taking spoken words
Speaker 1: and resolving them to a format that uh software can
Speaker 1: actually work with and treat in a predictable way. Um.
Speaker 1: You have to imagine all the timing, the inflection, the variation,
Speaker 1: just regional differences, uh, that someone's going to ask for something.
Speaker 1: And then also you have to think about all the
Speaker 1: various ways that someone could ask for the exact same things.
Speaker 1: It's an astronomical number of ways that that can happen.
Speaker 1: And it's the Alexa Skills Kit platform that actually resolves
Speaker 1: that problem, um in a lot of ways, UM for you.
Speaker 1: So I believe that's why they chose that terminology. It
Speaker 1: makes sense, right, And actually Amazon's corporate a corpus by
Speaker 1: the way, to throw another technology steward into the mix.
Speaker 1: UM is really a collection of data, and Amazon their
Speaker 1: service offers a large collection of that data at which
Speaker 1: is ever increasing by the way. UM. That simplifies the
Speaker 1: problem of resolving that speech and converting it into UM.
Speaker 1: What what the platform calls an intent, which is really
Speaker 1: an indication of something that someone would like to do
Speaker 1: at a given time. Yeah, it's interesting because if you
Speaker 1: think about it from a classical computing standpoint, if you
Speaker 1: wanted your computer to do something specific, uh, let's go
Speaker 1: back to the DOS days. We're not gonna go all
Speaker 1: the way back. We'll go back to DOST days because
Speaker 1: that's that's my childhood. Then you would type in a
Speaker 1: command and and the computer knew exactly what you wanted
Speaker 1: to do as long as the actual program is installed
Speaker 1: on your computer. Because you're following a very specific protocol
Speaker 1: that does not vary. That's right, always going to be
Speaker 1: the same. It's a one to one thing, and it's
Speaker 1: a textual interface and very consistent. Yes, but when you
Speaker 1: get to two different people, just just two people, and
Speaker 1: you just want them to ask for the same thing,
Speaker 1: but you're not guiding them in how to ask, that's
Speaker 1: same for that same thing. That's where you start getting
Speaker 1: into this, uh, this this variability and even if they're
Speaker 1: both saying the exact same phrase, if they're from my
Speaker 1: neck of the woods, there might be a bit of
Speaker 1: a droll that's right there. If they're up over in Maine,
Speaker 1: it's going to be a different sound if they're if
Speaker 1: they're no non native English speaker, they're gonna be in
Speaker 1: an inflection in their voice from whatever language was their
Speaker 1: primary language. So these are all non trivial problems actually
Speaker 1: in the in the programming world. Yes, so there's that problem,
Speaker 1: and then there's also an Amazon refers to this as
Speaker 1: the interaction model, which is the number of variances in
Speaker 1: how someone could ask for something, and the platform takes
Speaker 1: a fuzzy matching approach to solving that problem. Right, So
Speaker 1: instead of providing an exhaustive list of all of the
Speaker 1: various ways that someone could ask for information for an airport,
Speaker 1: for example, um, instead they use a artificial intelligence approach
Speaker 1: to that problem and generalize a set of training data
Speaker 1: that you actually provide as a developer, uh to to
Speaker 1: simplify that problem down. Okay, so yeah, because the first
Speaker 1: thing I was guessing was like I wonder if it's
Speaker 1: going to be probabilistic. It is one of those things
Speaker 1: where it assigns a probability that I'm pretty sure this
Speaker 1: is what they're asking for, so let's go for that.
Speaker 1: Uh exactly. Yeah. We've talked about that with some of
Speaker 1: the other artificial intelligence platforms out there, things like IBM
Speaker 1: S Watson being a very simple example, right, simple in
Speaker 1: the sense that it's easy to understand. It's actually a
Speaker 1: pretty complicated machine as it turns out. But the fact
Speaker 1: that you would say, all right, well, when it was
Speaker 1: playing jeopardy, it would never buzz in unless that certainty
Speaker 1: was greater than like an eight threshold. And once you
Speaker 1: explain to people that's what we mean by probabilistic, where
Speaker 1: a computer is determining, well, how how quote unquote sure
Speaker 1: am I that this is intent of the person giving
Speaker 1: the command then act upon it. One of the things
Speaker 1: I wanted to also mention about alexas skill, so we
Speaker 1: talked about how it's it's voice commands, right that you're
Speaker 1: giving it. These have their own kind of anatomy, Right,
Speaker 1: You've got the skill, where how how you activate the
Speaker 1: skill itself? What you call upon in order to make
Speaker 1: the skill happen, and UM, I wonder if you can
Speaker 1: maybe go into just a little bit like it might
Speaker 1: not be something that the end user would necessarily think
Speaker 1: about the developers would think about. Yeah, no exactly that.
Speaker 1: You know, it's got its own grab bag of terminology,
Speaker 1: but it's really not that complicated once you get past
Speaker 1: those initial things. Um. You know. So as a developer
Speaker 1: coming to the platform, the first thing that I asked was, well,
Speaker 1: what heck is the name of my app or skill?
Speaker 1: I mean, um and updating that in my mind? UM,
Speaker 1: and that is called the invocation name on the platform.
Speaker 1: So what that invocation does is it invocation name does?
Speaker 1: Is it maps a user's word? Basically? I think it
Speaker 1: as a name space like I came to you know,
Speaker 1: Alexa skills kit development as a Java developer and being
Speaker 1: able to give package names or name spaces two classes
Speaker 1: as a Java developer is very helpful. Um. And really
Speaker 1: that's what it does, uh, an invocation named. So for example, UM,
Speaker 1: in our class at Bigner Ranch that we've built for
Speaker 1: for Amazon, we we've given We've built a skill to
Speaker 1: give you information about airports and UM, you you say, Alexa,
Speaker 1: ask airport info for flight delays at a t L.
Speaker 1: For example, that airport info word or words is an
Speaker 1: invocation name, so that initially brings up the skill. It
Speaker 1: launches it so to speak UM. And then you've got
Speaker 1: sample utterances UM. I mentioned that you train UM. I
Speaker 1: kind of think of it as a brain in the cloud,
Speaker 1: UM that lives in the cloud to do our bidding
Speaker 1: for us for resolving the spoken words. UH. These sample
Speaker 1: utterances are what effectively resolve what someone's asking for to
Speaker 1: an indication or an intent that we'd like to ask
Speaker 1: for airport information. And Amazon has made some really smart
Speaker 1: decisions about making that a black box. Effectively, as a developer,
Speaker 1: all we do is provide that training data and on
Speaker 1: the other side we get an indication of what came out.
Speaker 1: We're not required to you know, set up a machine
Speaker 1: learning server or you know, artificial intelligence or deal with
Speaker 1: any of those algorithms that who knows how many countless
Speaker 1: engineers and hours Amazon is invested into building that infrastructure UM.
Speaker 1: But we've got that as a tool to resolve the
Speaker 1: information down to something that our skill service can work with.
Speaker 1: So with an Alexis skill, you've got a skill interface
Speaker 1: and a skill service the Skill interface is where this
Speaker 1: brain that I keep mentioning lives, and the skill service
Speaker 1: is it's really anything that can speak HTTPS. UM. Now
Speaker 1: with our class, we're using no JS, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: it's JavaScript on the server side. Everybody's it in a
Speaker 1: dab of JavaScript here there anyway, So it's an easy
Speaker 1: language for people to pick up and get into. If
Speaker 1: you've done you know, um uh, any web development, you've
Speaker 1: likely got some JavaScript exposure. UM. So it's really an
Speaker 1: extension upon that using some you know, you've got some
Speaker 1: additional things like file io and being able to write
Speaker 1: to a database using node. Uh. But with that JavaScript layer,
Speaker 1: we get events from the Skill interface and we're able
Speaker 1: to process those events and then send a message back
Speaker 1: using Jason right Java JavaScript object notation uh to the
Speaker 1: to the device, and she's able to speak speak our response.
Speaker 1: It's pretty cool. This is really well, I'm sorry, Dave,
Speaker 1: please go ahead. I was just gonna say to um
Speaker 1: to to add on to that. You can think of
Speaker 1: it in terms of you know, we've we talked before
Speaker 1: about Alexa translating human language into a way that she
Speaker 1: can talk to technology. It is the same when third
Speaker 1: party developers go ahead and enhance what she can understand
Speaker 1: through skills. So, if you are an Amazon customer and
Speaker 1: you have an Echo and you talk to your echo,
Speaker 1: and perhaps you're using what Josh describeder, you're using a
Speaker 1: starting phrase, uh and a invocation name to launch something
Speaker 1: like let's say Fitbit or uber or your your Domino's
Speaker 1: easy order. Your voice goes to Amazon. Your voice is
Speaker 1: never shared with a third party developer. You should think
Speaker 1: of Alexa almost as that friend that can can not
Speaker 1: only translate to other pieces of technology, but she can
Speaker 1: talk to all of these third party developers who have
Speaker 1: their own technology. Uh. And so in essence, for for Fitbit,
Speaker 1: when you talk to her, she understands that you're asking
Speaker 1: how you know, how did you do today? And then
Speaker 1: she goes and she talks to Fitbit, and Fitbit says, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, we have these servers and we have all
Speaker 1: these datas and and we know we uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we we know you're a customer. We're gonna return that.
Speaker 1: So go tell that customer this. And then Alexa goes
Speaker 1: and she tells you the information that Fitbit had for you. So,
Speaker 1: in in essence, it is translating between those things and uh,
Speaker 1: you mentioned before the probability. Uh, it's very interesting. As
Speaker 1: human beings when we have a conversation, we were constantly
Speaker 1: making choices like that too. I bring all of my
Speaker 1: experience to this podcast today, right, So when we're having
Speaker 1: a conversation, it's based on all the years that I've
Speaker 1: had a conversation and the understanding of what those words
Speaker 1: actually mean. And there's a lot of things that go
Speaker 1: on set. So for example, we all know what time
Speaker 1: of the day it is where we are, we know
Speaker 1: where we live, we know what country we're in. I
Speaker 1: know you know, I know how to stand up, I
Speaker 1: know what eyes and nose look like. I know what
Speaker 1: a computer ist I knew what when you reference Doss,
Speaker 1: A lot of machine learning is that a computer doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily have that context, right, And so when you're a
Speaker 1: third party developer, you know the the interaction model that
Speaker 1: jos described basically, think of it like, Uh, you and
Speaker 1: I are going to have a discussion around a new
Speaker 1: topic today. Maybe it's something to do with fitness, and
Speaker 1: so we all, you know, we all go look at
Speaker 1: a wiki or maybe we look at Reddit, and we
Speaker 1: define all the terms and then you and I can
Speaker 1: can have a conversation and actually understand all of that.
Speaker 1: And so that's what you're basically setting up when you
Speaker 1: want to add an additional skill to Alexa is Hey,
Speaker 1: here's all the terms, and when people ask for it
Speaker 1: like this in language, here's what I want you to
Speaker 1: tell me that they asked. And Dave you touched upon
Speaker 1: something early on in that too that I think is
Speaker 1: interesting and important to point out the idea that uh
Speaker 1: with with you communicating to Alexa, your information is going
Speaker 1: to Amazon. It's not being propagated across the internet willy nilly,
Speaker 1: being spread everywhere. That also ends up being an important
Speaker 1: part of some of the restrictions around the types of
Speaker 1: skill ales that Amazon will accept for Alexa, one being
Speaker 1: that they there aren't going to be uh child once
Speaker 1: once for children specifically, because there is a very real
Speaker 1: concern about privacy and information, particularly for children who may
Speaker 1: not fully understand or recognize the importance of that. Um.
Speaker 1: So are there other restrictions on the types of skills
Speaker 1: Amazon is going to except I would imagine that anything
Speaker 1: that was against the law right out the door not happening. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, um in the scenario that you described, because
Speaker 1: Alexa today has no way to distinguish between different voices.
Speaker 1: So if we had an echo in the room and
Speaker 1: I was talking and you were talking, that is both
Speaker 1: a human being, it's it's language. She cannot differentiate. So
Speaker 1: she cannot differentiate whether it is a child asking for
Speaker 1: something or an adult. And because of that, uh, and
Speaker 1: you know there are COPA regulations and and everything else
Speaker 1: when it is to mobile and web existing today, we
Speaker 1: want to make sure that we're honoring that and that
Speaker 1: we are protecting folks. Um your um uh second question
Speaker 1: around um, if there's anything else that we're not necessarily allowing,
Speaker 1: I think, um, there are. The guidelines are very similar.
Speaker 1: So we do have an Android app store today, an
Speaker 1: Amazon App Store which has very similar policy. So it
Speaker 1: is something that Amazon has been in that that space
Speaker 1: for years and we've kind of learned as we've gone through.
Speaker 1: We just launched an update to the Alexis Skills section
Speaker 1: where we have categories, and those categories are very similar
Speaker 1: to what people would expect in a mobile app store
Speaker 1: for you know, games, technology, things like that. So uh,
Speaker 1: you know it's very it's got to be PG thirteen
Speaker 1: and G you know, no our rated content anything like that.
Speaker 1: No UM personally identifiable information. You would not. You know,
Speaker 1: we're very careful about if you keep asking people all
Speaker 1: about them, why are you asking about them? And you
Speaker 1: better have a privacy policy for that that somebody has
Speaker 1: allowed you to ask for that information. We do not
Speaker 1: share any information about you. We don't share device information UM,
Speaker 1: although you know developers of course keep asking for those
Speaker 1: things you know they want to know is this coming
Speaker 1: from an echo or mulbile app? Because Alexa will run
Speaker 1: in anything. So there are UH apps for the iPhone,
Speaker 1: apps for Android where you can talk to Alexa and
Speaker 1: get access to all your skills. You can get access
Speaker 1: to all of your smart home functionality as well, using
Speaker 1: the same familiar Alexa experience. See and I am glad
Speaker 1: you were able to address that. I think that that
Speaker 1: actually is a very important thing for any platform to
Speaker 1: do well. You do. Actually it seems counterintuitive, but you
Speaker 1: do need to have those guidelines and restrictions there. And
Speaker 1: if you ever want to see what can happen if
Speaker 1: you don't put them there, you can look at some
Speaker 1: any dramatic lessons we've learned through things like Microsoft Ta,
Speaker 1: which was certainly not intended to turn into a big problem.
Speaker 1: It was that the intention, the intent was how long
Speaker 1: did that last? For like a day and hours? It
Speaker 1: was twenty four hours and then they pulled the plug. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did a full episode of Microsoft Taste. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to go back and do that, obviously, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to ask either of you to comment on that
Speaker 1: anymore than but just to just to say, like, if
Speaker 1: you have a system and you don't have those restrictions
Speaker 1: in and we are all in many ways like children,
Speaker 1: and sometimes as children, you want to test boundaries, and
Speaker 1: if you find there are no boundaries, problems happen. So
Speaker 1: I'm in favor of boundaries personally. That's actually one thing,
Speaker 1: uh that Amazon has done a really good job of
Speaker 1: is curating the experience as well. You know, they literally, um,
Speaker 1: as you submit your skill, audit that skill pretty thoroughly
Speaker 1: and pretty rigorously to make sure that it conforms to
Speaker 1: good Voice User Experience guidelines. Well, and when you're talking
Speaker 1: about a device that that you know people think of
Speaker 1: as listening to you, obviously you have a great responsibility
Speaker 1: in order to provide an experience that isn't going to
Speaker 1: be negative in any way. Uh, knowing that you know
Speaker 1: you have to take a lot of time and effort
Speaker 1: to make certain that you avoid any problems that could
Speaker 1: come later down the line. I mean, that's got to
Speaker 1: be pretty pretty top concern from Amazon. Yeah, that was,
Speaker 1: you know, very very important for us at Amazon when
Speaker 1: we created the device. And so if you're not using
Speaker 1: an Echo, you're using another device, you know, maybe it's
Speaker 1: a mobile app, or you know, maybe it's in the
Speaker 1: car or in a clock radio. All of those devices
Speaker 1: are pushed to talk. So those devices are never listening
Speaker 1: unless you hit a button. If you have an Echo device,
Speaker 1: you have the ability to hit a mute button, and
Speaker 1: when you hit a mute button, you actually see a
Speaker 1: red ring that goes around the outside letting you know,
Speaker 1: and we do cut power to the microphone as well
Speaker 1: when you hit that. Otherwise, Alexa is never listening unless
Speaker 1: she hears her name. So when you say Alexa, then
Speaker 1: we begin to record your voice. Your voice again is
Speaker 1: only sent to Amazon. We do not send that to
Speaker 1: third parties. And then you can open the Alexa app itself.
Speaker 1: You can see every same little thing that you've ever
Speaker 1: said to Alexa. After you've said Alexa and and then talk.
Speaker 1: And then you also have the ability to delete any
Speaker 1: one of those, or if you'd like, you can contact
Speaker 1: us and remove your entire history as well. So we
Speaker 1: do put all the control into the customer's hands. And
Speaker 1: obviously that was this great foresight on on the part
Speaker 1: of Amazon, because you could easily imagine that if you
Speaker 1: did not build that into your design from the ground up,
Speaker 1: that you would you would very quickly realize the need
Speaker 1: for that. And if that that, that's not a good feeling.
Speaker 1: I think in any of this, this scenario, because it
Speaker 1: is very new for people, it's about building up trust
Speaker 1: and it's about you know, I use terminology of crawling,
Speaker 1: then walking, and then running, and I think as a technologist,
Speaker 1: I always want to run, but it's important in a
Speaker 1: space like this to start out crawling, even if that
Speaker 1: means you're limiting what you can actually do with the device.
Speaker 1: And one of the you know, the things that I
Speaker 1: feel is a sign that that's been a success is
Speaker 1: that people come and they ask for more. You know, now, hey,
Speaker 1: I want Alexa to do more. It's okay, you know,
Speaker 1: give me permission. I wanted to control this. I wanted
Speaker 1: to control that, and gee, it would be great if
Speaker 1: we call it like, so people are now they're fine
Speaker 1: with the fact that they can talk to Alexa. Now
Speaker 1: I want Alexa to do even more. I want Alexa
Speaker 1: to wake up and start talking to me even if
Speaker 1: I haven't talk to her, which is something you know
Speaker 1: that she doesn't do today. She will never interrupt you
Speaker 1: or start talking out of nowhere unless you first engage.
Speaker 1: And I think that's a sign of customer trucks and
Speaker 1: people getting excited about where the technology is headed. That's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. I also want to say something else that
Speaker 1: I think is really cool. Um, you guys might disagree,
Speaker 1: and many listeners may disagree. But so I went back
Speaker 1: and I was looking at There are blogs for specifically
Speaker 1: for Alexa developers, which I recommend my listeners go out
Speaker 1: check out those blogs. They are not written in a
Speaker 1: way that is UH that's so dense or so technical
Speaker 1: that they are inaccessible. They are very accessible and I
Speaker 1: read over quite a few of them before we had
Speaker 1: this conversation, and one of the reasons why I wanted
Speaker 1: to bring this up. While they are incredibly helpful and technical,
Speaker 1: one of the examples that was used in UH in
Speaker 1: one of the blog posts spoke to a deep core
Speaker 1: within me where it was actually being used to explain
Speaker 1: what is a launch phrase? Was an invocation name and
Speaker 1: it was about um using Dungeon dice D twenty for
Speaker 1: that was me. Yeah, I'm as a hardcore D and
Speaker 1: D fan from way back. I hung out with Gary
Speaker 1: Guy Gags creator Dudgeons and Dragons. Yeah, edition campaign right now. Actually,
Speaker 1: if I hold this up talking about the video, you
Speaker 1: see all my D and D manuals right there. They
Speaker 1: can my originals. I can report that Dave in fact
Speaker 1: does have a stack approximately looks like about two ft
Speaker 1: tall of D and D manuals behind him. Um, first edition,
Speaker 1: all the way through a second. Oh Dave, you and
Speaker 1: me man this blogged this room and on the phone.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, so that was one of those things. But
Speaker 1: I like that the examples you guys give are interesting,
Speaker 1: they are easy to understand, and you also it's outside
Speaker 1: of that initial reaction I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: would have when they hear the word Amazon. Of course,
Speaker 1: their first thought is going to go towards online shopping
Speaker 1: and they're thinking, oh, well, this is going to be
Speaker 1: an app that just makes it easier for me to
Speaker 1: buy things. But then you get into something like this
Speaker 1: and you're like, well, no, this is here's something where
Speaker 1: imagine you've got a table and you know, you don't
Speaker 1: have a metric ton of dice weighing the table down.
Speaker 1: You actually have an app and you can just call
Speaker 1: on any time you need, and then that becomes incorporated
Speaker 1: into your game. It's almost like Alexa is playing the
Speaker 1: game with you, and people start to realize, oh, there's
Speaker 1: other stuff this can do that that aren't that isn't
Speaker 1: related to buying things. I personally think one of the
Speaker 1: cool decisions Amazon made with this is really treating it
Speaker 1: like an interface and as a developer, implementing that interface,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, for your purposes is really what the
Speaker 1: platform is is great at I mean at work. For example,
Speaker 1: we had a hackathon recently and um, I wrote a
Speaker 1: service in a lixer to be able to control and
Speaker 1: this runs on a Raspberry Pie to be able to
Speaker 1: control the servo locks on of the doors in our building.
Speaker 1: And I recently was able to write a skill that
Speaker 1: interacts with that Raspberry Pie via the web to open
Speaker 1: the door, um when we see a visitor come by.
Speaker 1: So the platform is totally open as a developer, and
Speaker 1: and uh, there's Something else I wanted to touch on
Speaker 1: as well, that as mentioned in the blogs and we've
Speaker 1: kind of touched talked about a little bit, is that
Speaker 1: the the coding side of this, it is a server side,
Speaker 1: not a device side, not a client side kind of service. Josh,
Speaker 1: can you talk a little bit about about why that
Speaker 1: is just for people who might wonder like, well, why
Speaker 1: would all this be? Why would all the the hard work,
Speaker 1: the crunching of numbers, if you will, Why is that
Speaker 1: happening in the cloud and not on on a dedicated device. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a great question. I mean, I think there are
Speaker 1: a couple of really solid reasons right away. You can
Speaker 1: list for one, um, you know, the fact that the
Speaker 1: Amazon Echo you'll likely have numerous devices, and being able
Speaker 1: to enable that skill and have it in the cloud
Speaker 1: um is an instantaneous thing across all of those devices,
Speaker 1: right So, I think that's one really solid reason that
Speaker 1: Amazon went without architecture. The other reason is moving everything
Speaker 1: to the cloud, right keeping it on that infrastructure, it
Speaker 1: allows for Amazon to iterate incredibly quickly on that skill
Speaker 1: interface side of things. UM, you know, not having that
Speaker 1: constraint to the device and worrying about shipping new hardware
Speaker 1: to make changes over time. Amazon can simply change out
Speaker 1: that in interface and interaction model um uh, you know
Speaker 1: pretty much seamlessly. Um and it works um incredibly well.
Speaker 1: And that's a that's a big part of it. It
Speaker 1: also enables um, you know, third party developers to host
Speaker 1: their own services wherever they want, and whatever technology they
Speaker 1: want doesn't have to be an Amazon Cloud using any
Speaker 1: language that they want. And we knew, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: we thought of some pretty interesting things for Alexa, but
Speaker 1: we knew we really need to an essence crowdsource her
Speaker 1: ability to get smarter. Uh. And there's now over fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred skills out there today by a third party developers
Speaker 1: who are creating things with you know, like job described
Speaker 1: about controlling doors and putting things in Raspberry pies and
Speaker 1: robots and drones and health health and life sciences and
Speaker 1: doctors offices and hospitals and games and virtual reality, you know,
Speaker 1: things that we never would have been able to right ourselves,
Speaker 1: that people have just taken uh and they've run with it.
Speaker 1: And I continue to be impressed every day by what
Speaker 1: people are doing. Yeah, exactly, Davin. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: you can embed you know, Alexa in if you're a
Speaker 1: hardware designer, you can build your own version of Echo
Speaker 1: with extended capabilities. In fact, you could have a display
Speaker 1: or you know, if you have visions about what that
Speaker 1: could be like, you can embed what's called Alexive Voice
Speaker 1: services within that hardware and actually create your own version
Speaker 1: of of the Echo, which is incredibly powerful. Interesting. So
Speaker 1: let's talk a bit now, Josh. You you work very
Speaker 1: closely over at Bigner branch and developing the kind of
Speaker 1: UH curriculum that someone would who wants to develop for Alexa.
Speaker 1: They'd find it very helpful they to to actually learn
Speaker 1: how to code something and crafts something. And you've mentioned
Speaker 1: before also that that one of the test skills people
Speaker 1: will develop is one about getting information about airports and
Speaker 1: potential delays. Let's let's kind of, in a layman sense,
Speaker 1: kind of walk through what is the process in general
Speaker 1: of of developing for Alexa, and then at the end
Speaker 1: of it, I think we can do a quick little demonstration. Alexa,
Speaker 1: by the way, I didn't introduce her. I feel like
Speaker 1: such a cad I didn't introduce her, but she is
Speaker 1: also in the studio with us. So Alexa, how are
Speaker 1: you doing today? Great. And if you're listening, make sure
Speaker 1: you're muted. Although you were already listening your your echo
Speaker 1: has probably gone on several times. My my parents are
Speaker 1: going to send me a very mad email. My parents,
Speaker 1: by the way, they have they're the ones who asked
Speaker 1: me to do this podcast because my parents own own
Speaker 1: and Echo, and they talked to it all the time,
Speaker 1: and they demonstrated to me all the time. And uh,
Speaker 1: the only reason I haven't picked one up yet is
Speaker 1: I've got to wait for my wife to go out
Speaker 1: of town just long enough so I can get it
Speaker 1: and incorporated into everything, so that when she comes back
Speaker 1: and sees that I bought it, it's so awesome and
Speaker 1: incorporated and integrated that she would never want to get
Speaker 1: rid of it. Yeah, I run the white I do
Speaker 1: the wife test with technology as well, and is slowly
Speaker 1: warmed up to She was resisted at first, but she's
Speaker 1: just accepted it into our home. Step one is is
Speaker 1: get my wife comfortable with Alexa. Step two is to
Speaker 1: get her into a D and D campaign. All right,
Speaker 1: So so we're I come to you, Josh, I just say,
Speaker 1: I say I am interested in starting to develop for Alexa.
Speaker 1: What's kind of the process of of learning to develop
Speaker 1: and and the process of actually developing in a skill. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so you mentioned earlier that you had read our
Speaker 1: blog and you followed that arc. It's um as you
Speaker 1: get into the process, it's really a couple of things
Speaker 1: that you get your brain wrapped around. Initially, you know,
Speaker 1: most developers are going to be coming from a graphical
Speaker 1: user interface background, right, I mean that's the lay of
Speaker 1: the land these days. Of the applications being written, though
Speaker 1: that's changing, are all graphical, right, because it's either meant
Speaker 1: for a smartphone screen or it's on a laptop or desktop. Yeah. Once, once,
Speaker 1: once mac os and and and Microsoft Windows really took hold,
Speaker 1: we started to see other types of UIs disappear, and
Speaker 1: then we just began to assume that was the only
Speaker 1: way you could do things for a while. Yeah, exactly right. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, however, the paradigm as we see is changing.
Speaker 1: So the first thing to understand is the skill interface
Speaker 1: portion of what I consider to be a two part thing.
Speaker 1: It's a skill interface and then a skill service. The
Speaker 1: skill interface, like I said, is responsible for resolving the
Speaker 1: user's words to the first step of building a skill,
Speaker 1: which is defining the interaction model, and so I consider
Speaker 1: consider that to be setting an invocation name, which we
Speaker 1: talked about earlier. It's the name of your skill, um
Speaker 1: and how a user is going to be communicating with it.
Speaker 1: So this is so that you can you can create
Speaker 1: a distinction between the skill that you're developing in every
Speaker 1: other skill that's out there on available on with Alexa. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right, and it's going to be unique to
Speaker 1: the skill that you're building. Um. Amazon will in fact,
Speaker 1: uh not allow you to have you know, of course,
Speaker 1: the same name of another skill that that introduces an
Speaker 1: interesting new like domain squatting type problem, that doesn't wonder,
Speaker 1: I wonder what will become of that at any rate? Um.
Speaker 1: So in our class, for example, one skill that we
Speaker 1: teach you to write, which gives you a pretty good
Speaker 1: cross action of all the different capabilities of the platform
Speaker 1: is the airport info skill. So my first step would
Speaker 1: be defining the invocation name of airport info in Amazon's
Speaker 1: skill interface. And this is literally a web portal that
Speaker 1: you visit and configure in your web browser. So as
Speaker 1: you can figure that. The next step that you get
Speaker 1: to is defining the sample utterances that as a developer,
Speaker 1: I need to hook into UM as a result of
Speaker 1: the resolution of what the interaction model said someone had
Speaker 1: just spoken into the device, right. So this is the
Speaker 1: kind of magic that we're talking about earlier. The black
Speaker 1: box that Amazon offers you UM that leverages the artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence and machine learning, you know, the cutting edge technology
Speaker 1: really there, UM, and we train that model up with
Speaker 1: sample utterances. So those sample utterances for airport information UM.
Speaker 1: It's actually UH, it's got a couple of different aspects.
Speaker 1: One is, UM, we want to be able to resolve
Speaker 1: the various ways that someone will ask for information about
Speaker 1: an airport. And then secondly, we've got to have a
Speaker 1: way to pass a variable into the application or the skill.
Speaker 1: So I want to be able to, for example, determine
Speaker 1: if someone had said SFO or a t l UM. Right,
Speaker 1: they're asking about it a specific airport code, and I
Speaker 1: need to be able to throw that into a variable.
Speaker 1: So the interaction model has a mechanism for doing that
Speaker 1: called a slot, and a slot is it's kind of UM.
Speaker 1: It's Amazon's terminology for basically a variable assignment that we
Speaker 1: want to be able to do. So in that in
Speaker 1: that set of sample utterances, we give strings that represent
Speaker 1: how user could ask for airport information. So I might
Speaker 1: ask for, uh, you know, Alexa, ask airport info for
Speaker 1: flight delays at a t L, um for flight information
Speaker 1: at a t L, for delay status at a t L.
Speaker 1: You see the very creations of ways that someone could
Speaker 1: ask for that info. UM. Now, like I said, it's generalized,
Speaker 1: so in other words, it's a fuzzy resolution between those
Speaker 1: phrases and UM. An intent. So an intent is an
Speaker 1: indication of what someone would like your skill to do.
Speaker 1: And we want our skill to be able to give
Speaker 1: us information about an airport. And so the skill interface,
Speaker 1: once we've set up that sample utterances list and we've
Speaker 1: said okay, the words that fall at this portion of
Speaker 1: what someone says are actually going to be dropped into
Speaker 1: this new thing called a slot. And I want to
Speaker 1: be able to have that as a variable on the
Speaker 1: second portion of building a skill, which is the skill service.
Speaker 1: So once the skill interface has done that work for me,
Speaker 1: and since the information of what it found of what
Speaker 1: someone had said to the skill service, that's where we're
Speaker 1: in node land, or like David said, it's really any
Speaker 1: programming language that can speak HTTPS and live on a
Speaker 1: server One of the steps that actually happened at that
Speaker 1: point too, is after you've set up everything that johsh
Speaker 1: talked about, in essence, this is what I want to
Speaker 1: talk about. Here's some examples of me using it in
Speaker 1: a sentence. That's where the computer science comes in. So
Speaker 1: that's where it runs in the cloud, and we actually
Speaker 1: do a bunch of uh, you know, AI and machine
Speaker 1: learning and everything that sits on top of Amazon Web Services,
Speaker 1: and we generate a lexicon and a language model, so
Speaker 1: it's it's all done ahead of time, and it's almost
Speaker 1: a you know, me being a sci fi geek, it's
Speaker 1: almost like the matrix when Neo says, teach me kung fu,
Speaker 1: and then he's like, I now know kung fu. That's
Speaker 1: the part that we do through the portal. So now
Speaker 1: Alexa knows kong fu, uh, and she can talk to
Speaker 1: you about kong fu. But you actually have to build
Speaker 1: something to be able to respond to that. And that's
Speaker 1: what Josh is talking about now when we move on
Speaker 1: to the node piece, right, Yeah, so this is the
Speaker 1: magic black box in the cloud that has you know,
Speaker 1: the cutting edge artificial intelligence technology that Amazon offers us
Speaker 1: um on the interaction model side of things, and as
Speaker 1: a developer, I provide a training data. Uh. When David
Speaker 1: said it's sort of prepares things ahead of time. It
Speaker 1: literally bakes that training data down into something that occurs,
Speaker 1: you know, in near real time. That interaction is is
Speaker 1: very very fast and there's there's little to no latency
Speaker 1: um and the reason is because they use that sample
Speaker 1: data to prepare a model ahead of time. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: really cool. It's it's super cool. It's you know, we're
Speaker 1: we're living a sci fi novel right now. I feel
Speaker 1: like I'm in cryptomic con or. So well, it's it's
Speaker 1: got to be exciting too to be a developer that
Speaker 1: gets to take advantage of that level of of technology
Speaker 1: and not have to build it yourself, Like to to
Speaker 1: develop on top of something that has already got this
Speaker 1: amazing capability and on the shoulders of giants. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're leveraging all of that platform and infrastry sure and
Speaker 1: research that's that's occurred there. Uh. And right now there
Speaker 1: is a language model out in the cloud that knows
Speaker 1: all about rolling dungeons and dragon dice, which is It's
Speaker 1: a reassuring thought, isn't it. I would say that that
Speaker 1: was critical and critical hit it too a good initiative
Speaker 1: in doing that, I'm terrible. I've lost my saving throw.
Speaker 1: It gets being cool, that's not she will actually she'll
Speaker 1: make a little scathing comment about you rolling a one.
Speaker 1: That's that's pa why I showed it so like if
Speaker 1: you could aller it. But the big light of my
Speaker 1: kids rolling some dice if they had one, and she'll say, hey,
Speaker 1: do you have a warple sword? If you hit twenty,
Speaker 1: oh nice because off the head there you go. Uh so,
Speaker 1: all right, So you you get to this point where
Speaker 1: you've you've defined what it is you you know, incode,
Speaker 1: You've defined what it is that the action that needs
Speaker 1: to happen, um and you've you've built it. So we've
Speaker 1: provided the training data and the interaction model, right, and
Speaker 1: we've said when you uh hear words that are along
Speaker 1: the lines of our request for airport information, I want
Speaker 1: you to send an airport info intent as part of
Speaker 1: a Jason payload to my skill service. And I also
Speaker 1: want you to grab I want you to wrap up
Speaker 1: what they said at this portion of that utterance into
Speaker 1: a variable that I can use on my skill service. UM.
Speaker 1: So the skill service in our class is living on UM.
Speaker 1: It's actually another Amazon service called Lambda UM, which is
Speaker 1: an HTPS server that spins up and shuts down. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like Hiroku. If anyone's ever done rubyond rails
Speaker 1: development here, Hiroku is a real go to for handling
Speaker 1: the DevOps side of things UM and it's kind of
Speaker 1: an on demand server platform that we're using in the
Speaker 1: class UH and so on that. On that AWS Lambda instance,
Speaker 1: we've written node code that handles parsing the HTTPS UM
Speaker 1: Jason payload that comes across from the Skill interface and
Speaker 1: it says, Okay, I've gotten Jason information here, and I
Speaker 1: received an airport info intent UM, and I've got a
Speaker 1: variable of a t L here, And with that information
Speaker 1: I can then do what I will with it. I
Speaker 1: mean I can I can go make a web request
Speaker 1: or right to a database I could call off to
Speaker 1: another service UM. And that's actually what we do with
Speaker 1: Airport info is we hit the Federal Aviation Administration's servers
Speaker 1: and request the status for a t L. Then we
Speaker 1: build a string which is what Alexa is going to
Speaker 1: respond with, and send it back to the Skill interface
Speaker 1: and that gets forwarded onto the device. So that's kind
Speaker 1: of the round trip of how an interaction with the
Speaker 1: skill would work and what we would do as the developer. There,
Speaker 1: so got the skill interface, skill service, skill service response
Speaker 1: to the interface and hands it back to the device.
Speaker 1: Now for practical experience for the person who's actually using Alexa. Obviously,
Speaker 1: all of that information, while awesome, is not something that
Speaker 1: you have to worry about. If you did have to
Speaker 1: worry about it, then you would not really have a
Speaker 1: consumer product in your hands. You'd be a developer. But
Speaker 1: in order for you to understand what is what's the
Speaker 1: end result with that, I thought i'd be cool, Josh,
Speaker 1: would you mind asking Alexa kind to give an example
Speaker 1: of that app in action? Yeah? Sure, So it's skill
Speaker 1: I should say I have. Don't worry about it. That's
Speaker 1: a common blunder initially coming into the thing. I think
Speaker 1: I said app once today as well, So we don't
Speaker 1: have any app. That's fair, that's fair, that's a good
Speaker 1: skill idea. Yeah, so alright, so let me first, let's
Speaker 1: un mute her, all right? So okay, So Alexa ask
Speaker 1: airport info for flight delays at a t L. There
Speaker 1: is currently no delay at Hartsfield Jets in Atlanta International
Speaker 1: ladies and gentlemen, This is an amazing day. Not only
Speaker 1: did we get to hear voice wrecking shouldn't service work
Speaker 1: in real time on this show? But there are no
Speaker 1: flight delays at the airport. Actually yeah, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: not calling it's not really calling the airport, it's not
Speaker 1: calling the f A uh. But this is this is
Speaker 1: really interesting again showing just a very simple application. Obviously,
Speaker 1: you could ask for lots of different things. Sorry, skill,
Speaker 1: but you could ask for lots of different things, including
Speaker 1: like if you were curious about what's the weather going
Speaker 1: to be? Like what what was the time of day?
Speaker 1: Can you play my favorite playlist on such and such?
Speaker 1: All of these sort of things that are all really
Speaker 1: just you know, if you come up with an idea
Speaker 1: that could be uh essentially if you could if you
Speaker 1: could do it across a computer web browser, and if
Speaker 1: you're able to translate that into an experience that works,
Speaker 1: especially speech um in a speech role, then it's it's
Speaker 1: totally possible. And only that, but I saw because I
Speaker 1: was curious about this. There are some things that we
Speaker 1: do with computers where if you were asking a question,
Speaker 1: you might need a little more information or a little
Speaker 1: bit more of Uh, it might be a little difficult
Speaker 1: to explain something just simply in spoken word. Uh. I
Speaker 1: find that all the time doing an audio podcast, that
Speaker 1: it can be kind of challenging to explain a certain
Speaker 1: concept without the use of visual aids. I saw that
Speaker 1: with Alexa you could actually pair that with something like
Speaker 1: a display on an app where you can you can
Speaker 1: have a little more information about whatever the request is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. Yes, So Amazon also provides a additional part
Speaker 1: of that response from the server called a card um.
Speaker 1: So if we sent that information onto the skill interface,
Speaker 1: what would happen is we could preserve or send additional
Speaker 1: info to the Alexa companion app, which is in your browser,
Speaker 1: it's on your phone, it's on the Android and Iosh
Speaker 1: client the interfaces with it, and we'd have a history
Speaker 1: um and additional info as well um that we could
Speaker 1: display with that card mechanism. Right, that's a great way
Speaker 1: of getting around what could be a real challenge. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's something that because we've designed so much of our
Speaker 1: interaction to be primarily a visual experience, there's certain tasks
Speaker 1: that you do that don't translate as easily into something
Speaker 1: that's audio based. Yeah, it's a really interesting aspect of
Speaker 1: voice user interface design as well. I mean it's such
Speaker 1: a um ephemeral format. It's it's here and then it's gone,
Speaker 1: and it's an interesting problem coming from you know, the
Speaker 1: graphical user interface background that everybody's got UM. I think
Speaker 1: being able to hook a little bit into the g
Speaker 1: u I side of things and persist data UM and
Speaker 1: allow people to refer to that back um. You know,
Speaker 1: it does give your skill legs beyond just that one interaction.
Speaker 1: You know, for situational experiences, an on demand info voice
Speaker 1: is great, but being able to carry it beyond that
Speaker 1: is also one of the things that the platform offers.
Speaker 1: That's fantastic. Now I have a question for both of you.
Speaker 1: I'm going to kind of start wrapping this up because
Speaker 1: I feel like we've got a nice, a nice foundation
Speaker 1: for a discussion here and I think that it will
Speaker 1: really uh, it's really enlightening to understand, like what are
Speaker 1: the challenges not just the challenges, but what are the
Speaker 1: potential benefits of this kind of technology. My question to
Speaker 1: both of you, and it's a pretty simple one, is
Speaker 1: what is your personal favorite skill that you've had a
Speaker 1: chance to play with on Alexa and Dave, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have you go first. Yeah. So, um, besides, you know,
Speaker 1: using the dice with my kids the funniest one, and
Speaker 1: this is this speaks I think a little bit to
Speaker 1: my maturity level. Is I have this skill enabled. It's
Speaker 1: called for a fart, and you can ask for a
Speaker 1: fart and you will get one through Alexa. So I
Speaker 1: actually I have dots so upstairs in my house. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, there's a dot in each one of my
Speaker 1: kid's rooms. And then I have a full echo in
Speaker 1: my bedroom. And there's actually a place in that upper
Speaker 1: hallway that I can say Alexa asked for a fart,
Speaker 1: and there is a symphony musical returned across the entire
Speaker 1: upstairs and I immediately here, Dad, not again. A nice,
Speaker 1: a nice chorus followed by groans. I can appreciate that
Speaker 1: as someone who loves puns and and grown and grown worthy. Hum. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's fantastic. All right, So Josh, you your answer, that's
Speaker 1: an interesting one. Well, I have to say on the
Speaker 1: pragmatic side of things, Um, I have used lift skill
Speaker 1: to great effect. So you just say, Alexa asked lift
Speaker 1: for a ride, and guess what a car shows up
Speaker 1: at your door right to pick you up. Amazing, and
Speaker 1: it's such a good fit for the platform as well.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're walking out the door, you say, I
Speaker 1: don't want to get my phone out. Let's let's have
Speaker 1: a car show up right now. Uh, and it happens.
Speaker 1: That's very convenient. And there is a if you you know,
Speaker 1: we talked a little bit about D and D. If
Speaker 1: you ever played um that goes all the way back
Speaker 1: into the old bulletin board systems days of Space Empire
Speaker 1: or anything like that, there is a skill called star
Speaker 1: Lanes by Joe Jo Quinta that basically allows you to
Speaker 1: do that and you can play It's a multi player
Speaker 1: online Space Empire game through Alexa, and that is one
Speaker 1: of my other favorites. I would highly recommend checking that
Speaker 1: out if you've ever played any of those games in
Speaker 1: the past. That could be quite addicting. That's really cool,
Speaker 1: I mean, and it really does speak to the potential
Speaker 1: for things that we can't even necessarily anticipate right now
Speaker 1: that could end up being either uh, it could end
Speaker 1: up being something where you know, people talk about for
Speaker 1: a little while like, oh, that's really clever. It's really
Speaker 1: neat use of the technology, or it could truly be
Speaker 1: transformative to the point where we didn't think about this
Speaker 1: and now we can't think of what what life would
Speaker 1: be without it. I mean, that's the that's the cool
Speaker 1: promise of this kind of tech is that it stands
Speaker 1: to be really disruptive, uh, for a type of technology
Speaker 1: that's been fairly set in its ways for the last
Speaker 1: several decades. And um, I love seeing this. I love
Speaker 1: the discussions about machine learning and artificial intelligence. I love
Speaker 1: the discussions about natural language and the challenges that we
Speaker 1: face when we try to create interfaces that can accept
Speaker 1: natural language as an input. Guys, I have to thank
Speaker 1: you so much for joining me on tech Stuff, Dave,
Speaker 1: Thank you, Josh, thank you. I really hope that you
Speaker 1: enjoyed your time here on on David. I know you're
Speaker 1: not actually in the studio, but I'll pick up my
Speaker 1: laptop and I'll just show you around in a minute.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Yeah. I really enjoyed being here today and
Speaker 1: having this conversation. Thank you so much for having me
Speaker 1: on the show. Absolutely yeah, thanks for having us, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: I was really stimulating conversation. Uh. Yeah. And Guys, like
Speaker 1: I said, if you want to learn more about developing
Speaker 1: for Alexa, or you just want to kind of give
Speaker 1: a better idea of what's going on when you are
Speaker 1: using a device or a service with Alexa incorporated into
Speaker 1: it and you're wondering, well, what's actually happening? Those like
Speaker 1: I said, those blog posts are really accessible. I've read
Speaker 1: a lot of developer blogs over the last ten years,
Speaker 1: and they are written in a way that is much
Speaker 1: easier to understand, even if you're coming in from a
Speaker 1: purely just just an area of curiosity, much easier to
Speaker 1: understand that some of the other ones I've have encountered.
Speaker 1: That makes me feel good. And I not that you
Speaker 1: know it's I am. I am a budding uh podcaster,
Speaker 1: but just last week I did actually launch a podcast
Speaker 1: along the same lines of just talking about Alexa, you know,
Speaker 1: similar to the blog post learning Um. The first episode
Speaker 1: aired with Charlie Kendall, who runs in our smart home,
Speaker 1: so it's me asking him you know what that team
Speaker 1: set out to accomplish it If you're if you're interested,
Speaker 1: if you're if your listeners want to check it out,
Speaker 1: it's Bitley Alexa dev Chat or just look for Alexa
Speaker 1: dev Chat on iTunes or Stitcher or tune in or
Speaker 1: any of the other catchers. Yeah yeah, I should also
Speaker 1: mention the video series for learning Alexa skill Kit Development
Speaker 1: just rolled out. At least the first two videos have
Speaker 1: rolled out, and um I believe Amazon is planning on
Speaker 1: rolling all of them out in the next few days. Um,
Speaker 1: so those are going to be available online. If you
Speaker 1: search for you know, Big nerd Ranch Amazon training videos,
Speaker 1: you should you should be able to find it that way.
Speaker 1: Fantastic guys. Thank you again and listeners out there. If
Speaker 1: you want to get in touch with me, you have
Speaker 1: a suggestion for a future episode, you gotta follow up question.
Speaker 1: You want me to either run down Dave or Josh
Speaker 1: and ask them, or you know, just want to say hi.
Speaker 1: You can email me addresses tech stuff at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com or drop me a line on Twitter
Speaker 1: or Facebook. The handle for both of those is text
Speaker 1: stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
Speaker 1: is it how stuff works dot com.