Odd Thomas Odd Blog

When Amazon introduced the Echo in the UK, it was the first time in a very long time I had been eager to try out some new technology; I had been waiting for the Google Home , but Amazon got there first so ended up with my money . My own personal feeling is that consumer technology seems to have stagnated over the past 5 years, with only incremental instead of revolutionary advances, so nothing really piqued my interest until affordable home control came into being, something that was finally within my budget.  Being able to combine it with the Philips Hue system was great; though trying to find answers to questions proved ... interesting. Then, back in June, I decided to try and build my first Alexa skill.  Nothing major, just a feed from this blog as a daily flash briefing.  It worked, but I decided not to publish it as I would hardly consider the content of this blog to be frequent or interesting enough to warrant it joining the likes of CNN, BBC, Sky, and the re...

As if it wasn't narcissistic enough that I have a blog about the random stuff in my life - of which there is PLENTY I have yet to tell you all - my desire to learn something new has lead to the creation of an Alexa skill that should read my latest posts to you as part of your flash briefing! The motivation behind this is a bit more mundane. As a tech developer who is always looking for new things to get to grips with, I thought it would be a simple introduction into the world of Alexa skills development; certainly the creation of content skills seems to be the easiest route to get started, with this blog providing an RSS feed managed by Feedburner .  As skills go, it isn't exactly going to be the most popular and would probably be a good candidate for some kind of 'worst app' award, but as it is really just a test and an introduction to the tech, I'm not overly worried about it.  Yet. However, it is still in test as I am learning the Alexa developer interface ...