I'm trying to build an alexa skill that fires a custom alarm every set number of times per day (30 min intervals for example). I'm reading through their docs and not fulling understanding where to go to next.
Does anyone have some good Alexa skill apps that I can reference or an article? I couldn't find much online and it looks like it hasn't been an accessible feature for too long.
You cannot trigger Alexa to speak without user interaction. That means, the user has to say something to trigger your skill, which will in turn create a request to you skill's backend, and you can only respond (be it audio or speech) back to that request.
However, you can send Push Notifications.
Notification indicators inform end users that new content is available
from Alexa skills and domains. When a notification is delivered,
depending on what the product is capable of, the user is notified by
visual and audio indicators.
More on Push Notification here
Related
I've built a custom integration for Dialogflow CX which allows the user to send multiple messages to the Agent. However, the Agent doesn't understand what the user is trying to say when it receives more than one message.
How can I configure my Agent to wait a predetermined amount of time (allowing the user to send as many messages as possible) before trying to reply so that the Agent can make sense of all the text that was sent?
Unfortunately, that's not how Dialogflow-CX agents work. You can't wait a predetermined amount of time before answering: to each prompt from the user the agent will provide a fulfilment if it's specified.
The only way to achieve what you're asking is to develop an integration starting from the API they provide. You could develop an integration which waits a determined interval, joins all text received and sends it to the API via detectIntent request. This way you could have the user input multiple texts and only return a response when needed, but you'd need to handle the logic yourself (meaning a basic to intermediate knowledge of a programming language probably).
Can I schedule a developed skill in Alexa.
For example, I have written some code to do an operation(skill) and that has to be triggered on any scheduled time.
Thanks
Alexa cannot be activated by an external trigger, which means, it will respond only if the user initiates the conversation. But ALexa does provide Notifications and Reminders access to custom skills. Basically there are 2 ways to get an update on your YouTube view count, but none of them are ideal.
Reminders
You can add the Reminders functionality to your custom skill, so that it will remind you everyday at a certain time. But it will always preface the conversation with 'Here is your reminder.'
Notify Me - Alexa Skill
This is an Alexa skill that once you enable, will give you a URL. You can use the URL on a service like IFTTT with webhooks and have it send you notifications. This will show up as a yellow ring on your Alexa device. But, Alexa will not read it out to you unless you ask 'Alexa, what are my notifications?'
As for today it is not possible for Alexa just to say something back after some time.
But that you can do is to take a look at Notifications. Then your users can check pilled messages once they have time.
Or you can try Alerts functionality if users should take an action immediately. Think of it as a timer which starts beeping once it is about time.
I want to ask about the situation that is related to the renaming of a user by an administrator. It can take up to 10 minutes (from the disclaimer) to get user's name changed, but the notification about update event is sent immediately. There is no way to understand whether user's data is changed or not at the moment when notification is received. The only way to process it correctly is to delay processing by 10 minutes which is not good for me.
Is there something that I've missed to handle this? Otherwise it is quite useless API.
I am noticing AWS SES stats are not being updated in real-time. After sending email, it takes time for sent count to increase on SES Dashboard. Sometimes it takes few minutes and sometimes it takes long.
Has anyone also experienced this? Any thoughts?
On the assumption that the console is simply making a call to a standard API action (rather than using some kind a console-only backend service that is not documented or user-accessible -- such things are not unheard-of, but are pretty rare in AWS, so it's a reasonably safe assumption), it looks like this is not really designed to be real-time. The stats are reported in 15 minute windows.
From the SES API reference:
GetSendStatistics
Returns the user's sending statistics. The result is a list of data points, representing the last two weeks of sending activity.
Each data point in the list contains statistics for a 15-minute interval.
— http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/APIReference/API_GetSendStatistics.html
AWS/SES dashboard stats are for pure hint performace but not to rely on them. In such case, if you want to have real time notifications of sent emails you will need to create SNS notifications. Keep in mind that Spam-Complaint notifications can take up to a couple of days as this is based on information provided by the ISP to Amazon. And complaints within the Gmail evil-system will NEVER get to you.
Using Facebook real-time updates I want to get notifications when and user (of my application) has connected with another (not necessarily of my application). It looks logical to subscribe using object="user" with fields="friends" which I did. The problem is the amount of notifications I'm getting (too many): it looks like I'm notified not only when an user connects/disconnects with another. Is it possible to get notifications ONLY for these types of events?
Thank,
George