BotCube

Hey guys, I’ve just finished our first version of awesome-alexa list!

I want it to be the main knowledge and resource base about Amazon Alexa.

It’s pretty empty right now, but you can help me fix it.

Feel free to message me (@maximabramchuk) or just directly send pull requests.

Also, clicking a “Star” icon would mean the world for me 🙂

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate your help, folks!

https://github.com/GetStoryline/awesome-alexa

Amazon will let developers build Alexa skills that recognize unique voices in 2018

Amazon today announced that developers will be able to build Alexa skills that recognize unique human voices, starting in early 2018. Personalized voice profiles are set up through the account of the primary user of an Alexa-enabled device and can be extended to up to 10 users.

Called “Your Voice by Amazon,” voice profiles that recognize up to 10 users were first made available last month. This type of personalization makes it possible for Alexa to deliver the right flash briefings when someone in your household asks “What’s the latest news?” It also powers personalized shopping and allows Alexa to use the right contacts when you say “Call work” and to deliver tailored music results if you have the Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan.

Letting third-party Alexa skills identify users based on voice could potentially lead to native payments for Alexa skills. Today, payments for skills like Starbucks or Wingstop are often entered via websites or apps for preset orders.

Personalization for Amazon voice apps could also lead to more Alexa skills made especially for games. From reports of CEO Jeff Bezos’ gaming interest to Alexa Accelerator investments, games with Alexa-enabled devices are becoming a bigger part of Amazon’s effort to grow its Alexa skills ecosystem. Last month saw the debut of When in Rome, one of the first known board games led by Amazon’s Alexa. The game was the product of Alexa Accelerator graduate Sensible Object. A series of six board games, called Voice Originals, is also due out next year.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/28/amazon-will-let-developers-build-alexa-skills-that-recognize-unique-voices-in-2018/

Christmas is coming 🎅

Since you guys are interested about bots, the best gift will be a new smart speaker with a voice assistant inside!

But how to choose one?

Here is a great guide on that: https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/18/how-to-pick-a-smart-speaker-this-holiday-season

It’s Amazon’s World—But Do You Want to Live There?

If Amazon were an animal, it would be an octopus. Its tentacles are in retail and grocery stores, consumer goods and electronics, home services, streaming media, cloud computing and publishing—to name just a few. Recently, the leviathan has been extending its reach toward pharmacies and conference rooms, and building new inroads into our homes and families.

By week’s end, there was a short list of things Amazon hadn’t helped me with: booking a doctor’s appointment, picking up a prescription, scheduling a haircut, and buying a flight. How long before that—and all the other stuff on all of our to-do lists—can be crossed off with a click and a Prime membership?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-amazons-worldbut-do-you-want-to-live-there-1512586126

Amazon has just released a brand new Test Simulator for Alexa skills

The new simulator expands existing testing capabilities such as text input, JSON debugging, and visual display by adding features like the ability to test multi-turn conversation, entity resolution, dialog management, and more.

With the new voice input capability, you can validate Alexa’s understanding of the spoken word and how the skill responds.

The new device event log shows the directives that are sent to the devices, which allows you to understand how the skill interacts with the device.

That’s a totally new level of testing for Alexa skills 🔥

https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/577069bd-d9f9-439a-b4bf-3b0495e3d24b/announcing-new-test-simulator-beta-for-alexa-skills

Microsoft introduced the Azure Bot Framework more than two years ago and companies have been building chatbots for a variety of scenarios ever since.

Today, the company made generally available the Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Microsoft Cognitive Language Understanding service (known as LUIS).

When you combine the bot building tools with the LUIS language understanding tool, you get what should be a powerful combination.

The latter helps the bot understand and parse the query to deliver the correct answer (and understand related queries).

Cheng said more than 200,000 developers have signed up for the Bot service, and they currently have 33,000 active bots in areas like retail, healthcare, financial services and insurance.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/13/microsoft-launches-bot-engine-and-language-understanding-services-out-of-beta/

Today, Facebook is launching a new ad unit that will let businesses create a link between the two platforms: advertisers can now include a button on their ads so that people can call or message via WhatsApp with the click of a button.

The new feature getting announced today, more generally, follows on from some bigger developments for how WhatsApp is already being used by businesses.

The new button ad-unit is also similar to the click-to-Messenger ads that Facebook previously rolled out.

Since Manychat is killing it with simple bots that are connected to Facebook Ads, it sounds like a huge opportunity for bot builders 🤘

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/13/click-to-whatsapp-messaging-buttons-are-now-rolling-out-in-facebook-ads

A lot of you guys have been busy building chatbots and still haven’t had a chance to dive into the voice space.

I’ve found a really great video to help you get started.

It’s an introduction into the whole Amazon Alexa ecosystem.

It explains what is Amazon Alexa, how to build apps for it, what apps are there and a plenty of other stuff.

It’s quite long, but totally worth it.

I highly recommend you to watch this video if you want to start building voice bots for Amazon Alexa.

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cjsxRtrbNs

Apple wants to buy Shazam for $400 million

Seems like a big number, right?

But if you factor in Shazam’s last round of funding, which valued the company at around $1 billion, a $400 million price tag is a steal.

But what would Apple do with Shazam?

Well, Apple likely wants Siri to do what both Amazon and Google are working on: help the user figure out the world around them, and also sell them content.

Siri should be able to extract valuable information for the user from what it hears and what it sees. 

It could also then let you add that song to your Apple Music playlist, watch the trailer, or even buy the movie on iTunes, and so on.

That’s much easier to achieve once Siri has swallowed Shazam.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/09/apples-shazam-steal-is-all-about-siri/

⚡️HEROES, a tool which allows social media Influencers to send direct messages to their fans on Facebook Messenger, is launching today on Product Hunt!

Think of it as a parallel channel alongside Instagram or Youtube, but entirely chat-based, where Influencers can directly broadcast content to their follower's Messenger, be it a private video or a voice message.

Influencers are able to schedule their broadcasts and even segment their audience, creating richer and more interactive experiences both for them and for their users.

In the future, HEROES will let Influencers directly monetize from their audience through subscriptions and in-chat sales as well as Influencer Marketing campaigns.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/heroes-for-facebook-messenger

Drift today launched the Drift Platform to give developers tools to make Drift bots for marketing and sales.

Drift Platform gives developers and businesses using Drift the ability to make custom bots and integrations.

The Drift App Directory will allow customers to find and discover bots made by third-party developers, enterprise software makers, or Drift customers.

Unlike Slack or Microsoft’s bot offerings for chat apps like Microsoft Teams or Slack, Drift bots are most often used on apps and websites.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/05/drift-launches-third-party-platform-for-sales-and-marketing-bots/

Smart speakers from Amazon and Google are setting records

Amazon announced today that the Black Friday through Cyber Monday weekend resulted in “millions of Alexa devices sold.”

“This weekend, Echo Dot was the #1 selling product on Amazon globally, from any manufacturer in any category…Echo Dot was the best-selling device at Whole Foods Market over the holiday weekend.”

Google Home Mini devices were already sold out at Walmart by 9:00 am on Black Friday.

Smart speakers are shaping up to be the most popular gift this holiday season.

Just think about it.

A couple of millions users added to the voice market during Black Friday.

Still haven’t built anything for Alexa and Google Home? 🤨

https://www.voicebot.ai/2017/11/28/amazon-says-millions-alexa-devices-sold-black-friday-weekend/

Facebook chatbots are exploding, and for good reason.

They enable you to create sophisticated interactive messages that engage your audience where they hang out.

Messenger Marketing is so very new, many companies are a little uncertain about the best way to send out messages.

Should they just duplicate what they’re doing on email?

Should they send lots of promotional messages? Or avoid promotional messages?

Here is a great and very comprehensive article about different best practices for sending broadcasts through Facebook Messenger from Manychat team.

Must read for sure!

https://blog.manychat.com/how-to-send-facebook-messenger-broadcasts/

Amazon has finally released Alexa Gadgets

Alexa Gadgets are a new category of connected products and developer tools for building fun, interactive experiences.

Voice is the new gaming frontier.

Pioneers of voice games are reimagining a whole new way to engage players, feeding their curiosity with new ways to play—including interactive adventures, family friendly games, quiz games, and so much more.

Right now it’s even more interesting to build games for Alexa.

Here is a short video on how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA20rRVfe1Y

More information: https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/gaming

Amazon is putting Alexa in the office

At the AWS reinvent conference, Amazon announced Alexa for Business.

The new platform will let companies build out their own skills and integrations for both practical and business use cases.

The first focus for Alexa for Business is conference room.

Just as developers can build skills for Amazon Echo users, businesses can now build out Alexa skills for use within their own company.

You could imagine voice access to an employee directory, Salesforce data on various clients and accounts, or company calendar information.

Alexa for Business is a two-sided project for Amazon.

On the one hand, Amazon gets added data and revenue from larger-scale customers and, on the other, enterprise businesses will likely hop on the platform to build APIs and skills for a new breed of customer.

But the first challenge is getting large companies to invest in a huge quantity of Echo devices.

Given the shift toward voice interfaces, it’s likely not a question of if, but when.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/30/16720138/amazon-alexa-business-announcement

Amazon is launching a lot of AI services

On Wednesday at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced one new AI service after another.

The new tools do things like measure sentiment, track people in video feeds, and translate languages, among other things.

The most interesting one for us, bot builders, is Amazon Comprehend - service can pick up on positive or negative sentiment and specific people, places, and phrases in the text.

You can check it out below.

It's a great alternative to all those stuff from Google and Facebook.

https://aws.amazon.com/comprehend/

The world's first headphones to equip artificial intelligence

Did you see the “Her” movie? It is impressive, isn’t it, but not real, science fiction. Hmm, the voice part of the puzzle is already here: Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, Sire etc. We need the head phones part for voice first UX from the “Her” movie.

Welcome to the future!

‘vinci 2.0’ are the world’s first smart headphones to feature a built-in AI (artificial intelligence) assistant that utilizes biosensing hardware and neural network learning algorithms. this means that whenever users listen to music and make voice commands, it collects and analyses data, such as heart rate and location, in order to familiarize and predict their preferences. with this, the in-ear device has 3G cellular, music streaming, voice assistant, health sensors and fitness coaching under its control.

https://www.designboom.com/technology/vinci-2-0-headphones-artificial-intelligence-11-25-2017/

Messenger now allows sellers to invoice buyers through PayPal’s new chat extension

The feature is ideal for use with Facebook’s numerous Buy and Sell groups as well as Facebook Marketplace, in addition to being an easy way to send PayPal invoices in general.

This time, the focus is on shifting small business transactions and those between buyers and sellers into Messenger.

That leaves room for a product like PayPal’s to aid with transactions, given Facebook’s lack of interest in building out a payments business itself.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/21/sellers-can-now-invoice-buyers-through-paypals-new-chat-extension-for-messenger/

Dialogflow is launching API v2 and Enterprise edition

Since Google has acquired api.ai (now called Dialogflow) a long time ago, it remained completely free and hasn’t even had any pricing information anywhere on their website.

But many of their clients have asked for enterprise support, and today they’re launching Dialogflow Enterprise Edition.

Also, they’re releasing API v2 which is the next iteration of their developer API adding new features and capabilities, integration with Google Cloud Speech and many more.

Read more about the update in their article below.

https://blog.dialogflow.com/post/dialogflow-api-v2-and-enterprise-edition/

Creating voice bots is hard.

Creating good voice bots is super hard.

There are 16,000 Alexa skills with 0 reviews.

They are Zombies.

People never get back to them.

The way to avoid it is to precisely understand the use case for the voice bot you’re building.

To come up with some ideas, I went through top Alexa skills and read all the user reviews.

And I learned a ton of stuff.

Read my article below to understand what makes a voice bot stand out.

https://medium.com/storyline-blog/what-i-learned-from-5000-reviews-of-top-5-alexa-skills-82aa54b5fc15