Programming Snapshot – Alexa
Equipping Alexa with self-programmed skills
Asking Alexa only for built-in functions like the weather report gets old quickly, and add-on skills from the skills store only go so far. With a few lines of code, Mike teaches this digital pet some new tricks.
Okay, I admit, I don't like getting up from the sofa to check out something on the Internet if my phone is out of reach. But who does? In the household of the future, a device like Amazon's Echo will be around to help you with things like this in the form of a tin can in the living room. The Amazon Echo Dot, which looks much like a hockey puck (Figure 1), is the successor to the tin-can-like Echo device and offers the same voice interface at a lower price point.
Figure 1: The Echo Dot Bluetooth speaker.
Amazon's dream, of course, might be that customers at home will just shout "Alexa, order toilet paper," to send the language assistant scurrying off to place the order with the Internet discounter, who then quickly dispatches a drone to deliver the much-needed household item to the anxiously waiting consumer.
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