I have integrated my amazon echo device with the amazon portal associated to my account. I was able to create my own custom question with the Alexa Skills Kit and process with an AWS Lambda function to generate a response.
My question is: is it possible to programatically "push" a message to the echo device? For example, I would like for it to speak without having to ask it a question. I'd like it to do something at a specific moment.
If it is possible, could you please share any sample code to achieve this?
It is not currently possible, but it is an oft requested feature on the AWS forums.
http://forums.developer.amazon.com/forums/thread.jspa;jsessionid=EC0D457A400B594DD0F0561EEB43A8FA?messageID=17713䔱
I've not done this myself but it seems using the Alexa Voice Service could do the trick. It allows processing of voice from any type of audio capture and sends it to the Alexa Service. It seems possible you could record the proper phrase into a sound file and send that to AVS, thus triggering the Alexa service.
I know it's capable but Amazon hasn't offered it as a feature yet. If you go to the Echo web site http://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#cards, Settings, Connected Home and select Discover devices, the echo will perform a command triggered from the web site and will speak when completed. I didn't have to say a word.
From what I read on an article about notifications here, they were going to do something that meant you still had to ask Alexa to tell you your notifications, which would build up throughout the day and cause your device to light up and chime to let you know you had a notification to listen to.
Rather than allowing Alexa to randomly blurt stuff out any time she feels like it.
Which kinda seems pointless if you don't get the notification at the exact time it was sent, for example a smart home connected device triggering an alert to let you know you left your door open too long or the app automatically reading you the weather when you get up and turn on the coffee pot in a morning, things like that. If you have to ask for the notifications you may as well just do the speaking and request stuff from the beginning.
Maybe I'm wrong but that's how it reads to me.
Surely we want, with opt-in permission per skill, to allow Alexa to just say whatever she likes whenever she likes from the skills we have set up receiving such commands, without us having to say oh I see I have notifications let me ask what those are.
Just for people who stumble across this question in 2021:
The solution is to use Amazon Proactive Events
Your Skill has to request for the notification permission, subscribe for a specific event and then you can generate a access token and POST events to the amazon API.
Took me some hours to find out because Amazon offers different things which all sound quite similar but some are deprecated (ASK CLI v1) and others are just for Alexa device manufacturers.
Wuhu! Sounds like Amazon may enable push notifications this Fall.
Digital Trends Article
Amazon is expected to establish guidelines for developers and manufacturers so that Alexa remains classy and doesn’t become an interrupting nag.
Related
If I were to create a client desktop application, I'm trying to find a reliable way to notify client applications of new data that needs to be queried from the server. Would pubsub be a good use for this? Most of the documentation I see for it seems to be focused on server to server communication, and is a bit ambiguous if this would work well for server to client notifications.
If it should work, would I be able to properly authenticate subscribers to limit the topics they could subscribe to? This application would be potentially downloadable by anyone, and I would need to ensure that information intended for one client couldn't end up in the hands of another client.
Cloud Pub/Sub is not going to be a good choice for this use case. First of all, note that each topic and project is limited to 10,000 subscriptions. Therefore, if you intend to have more than that, you will run out of subscriptions. Secondly, note that a subscription only receives messages published after the subscription is created. If you only need messages to be delivered that were published after the user came to the website, this may be okay. However, with these two issues combined, you'll need to consider lifetime of your subscriptions. Do they get deleted when a user logs out? If not, when a user comes back, do you expect them to get all of the messages published since the last time they visited?
Additionally, as discussed in the comments, there is the issue of authentication. Your client-side app would have to have the credentials to subscribe. This would require you to essentially leak those credentials into your client-side code, which could be a vulnerability in your application.
The service designed to deliver notifications of this nature is Firebase Cloud Messaging.
If you want to open the application to anyone on the internet, you can't rely on the IAM service that only works with Google identity -> You can't ask your user to have a Google Account, the user experience will be bad.
Thus, you can't use IAM service to secure the PubSub access, and thus to use PubSub because anyone could access it.
In your use case, the first step is to ask the user to register (create an account, validate email, maybe use payment method,...). Then, you have an identity, but managed by you, not by IAM. You know which messages are for this user and which aren't.
If you want to be notified "in real time", I propose you to use long polling method or streaming to push data to the user. Cloud Run is now capable to do this and I recommend you to have a look on that.
I have a reason for this question. So I would appreciate positive responses.
AWS is a black box to me.
In my mind all services offered by AWS are plug play. So AWS has a user interface where you register a bunch of info and you click a button and AWS takes care of it.
But clearly that's not the case because there are AWS services based interview questions.
So I am not sure if there is a coding element to it. Can someone demystify AWS and all its services on a higher level to me ?
Like AWS EMR/EC2/Lambda/SNS/SQS - Just a one word response is fine. Right now to me its a button clicking services with zero coding or skill. But clearly I am wrong.
Right now to me its a button clicking services with zero coding or skill. But clearly I am wrong.
I'm going to assume that your question is something along the lines of why they're called "web services", rather than what each service does. If the latter, then you've gotten a lot of links in the comments. I'd also Google for Amazon's Cloud Practitioner videos.
The reason why AWS is called a web service is because that's exactly how they work: when you want to do something, you make a GET/POST/PUT/DELETE to the endpoint for a service. For example, to send a message to an SQS queue in the us-east-1 region, you make a POST request to https://sqs.us-east-2.amazonaws.com.
Each of these requests is signed, using an access key and secret key. If you don't properly sign a request, it will be rejected.
While you can construct these GET and POST requests yourself, AWS provides a bunch of language-specific SDKs that do it for you. For example, if you want to send a message to an SQS queue using Java, you would write something like this:
AmazonSQS client = AmazonSQSClientBuilder.defaultClient()
// this is available from the console, or you could make another call to retrieve it if you know the queue name
String myQueueUrl = "...";
client.sendMessage(myQueueUrl, "an example message");
EDIT: The original question asked for a real-time solution. I am not sure this is necessary. It should be about as fast as sending a standard SMS text message.
I want to integrate group chat in my android / ios app. There is a similar question found here, but the answers are old and I would like to see if there are any new / better solutions.
I am currently using multiple AWS services in my app, and would like to keep my chat solution in the same ecosystem. However, if there is a solution outside of AWS that is much easier to implement with good results, I am open to the suggestion.
Based on my research I have come across a couple of possibilties:
This AWS blog lightly covers using ElastiCache for this purpose
This LinkedIn slideshow demonstrates the possibility of using AWS IoT
Requirements for my chat:
Would like to be able to support up to 500 people per chat group
Usable from the web via online portal that has the same general functionality as the mobile app
Needs to be scalable to handle thousands of groups
Needs to handle emojies (cross platform)
Needs to allow for file transfers. Images and GIFs at the very least.
Send push notifications to users who have elected to recieve them when they are not currently active in the group
Are either of my possiblities a good fit for my requirements? Which would be the easiest to implement? Are there other, easier solutions inside of AWS? Outside of AWS?
Take a look at https://github.com/tinode/chat
It's not a 100% what you want but close. There is a third-party DynamoDB adapter for it: https://github.com/riandyrn/chat
I am posting this answer to close the question. I ended up switching from AWS to Google Firebase in order to use the Real Time Database.
There is a chat example here that might help anyone that stumbles onto this question.
I'm building an Alexa skill that will allow Alexa users to interact with a consumer facing e-commerce site. There is functionality to call a representative that already exists on the site. Now, I want to build out a voice app as a side project that extends that same option via a conversation. There will be a need for slots like location, category of call, etc. It's basically an Application/Transactional bot.
In the future, if this is successful, I'd like that same general app to be accessible on different IoT devices (like Google Home Assistant, etc.) Therefore, I'd like to abstract out the voice interactions and have the same (general) flow and API to interact with.
This leaves me doing some research on different technologies like api.ai, wit.ai, Lex, etc.
But, since this is an app for Alexa and I already rely on AWS and Amazon in general, I think I'd prefer to use Lex or just write a native Alexa app for now.
I'm having a hard time understanding the differences between the two. I understand that Alexa was built using Lex and I see that they have similar concepts like intent, slots, etc.
But, I'm looking for any differences between the two services:
Would using Lex allow me to more easily integrate with other devices? Or is there any benefit?
Would using Lex allow me greater flexibility in designing/modifying the flow of a conversation? It seems like Lex is a little more complex and, therefore, might allow greater functionality.
Or is it just that Lex offers nearly the exact same functionality and is just meant for devices that aren't Alexa?
Does Lex offer any more analytics processing than Alexa? In Alexa I can only see intents/slots, but if I could see the actual text in Lex, that would be ideal.
Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is used to build skills for use in the Alexa ecosystem and devices and lets developers take advantage of all Alexa capabilities such as the Smart Home and Flash Briefing API, streaming audio and rich GUI experiences. Amazon Lex bots support both voice and text and can be deployed across mobile and messaging platforms.
Lex Faqs
In my view (very limited Alexa dev experience) AWS Lex allows greater control over the bot dialog. It defines separate validation and fulfilment code hooks, enables specific prompts for slots on the UI, supports programmatic transitions between intents, gives proper versioning and alias handling, etc... so it seems it's more of an enterprise offering as opposed to "consumer-level" Alexa skills.
But surprisingly it lacks a few important features, e.g. it does not have a built in "boolean" slot type, so you have to code around yes/no questions. Or there are no Cloudwatch logs for lex at all. Also the (growing) list of integrations will make it more generic.
But despite being a huge AWS fan, I have to say that api.ai seems to be a reasonably more polished, feature rich proposition at least for now.
With regards to integrations with other devices, I do not think any of these platforms promise that. It seems that if you target Google home, than it's their platform, if you target Alexa, then hmm it's alexa or api.ai (not sure if Google will push this in the future). But if you plan to integrate with chat platforms, or directly into web applications, then I think all major platforms can give you that, or in the near future.
By the way, have you checked IBM Watson or Microsoft Bot framework (with LUIS)? They are also very capable, complete frameworks, too, don't discount them!
There is a risk using an external NLP service to process raw text delivered by Alexa over its native hobbled interaction model. Amazon may not certify your skill. This is unfortunate to hear, but their excuse is the threat of exposing private user data users may not realize they're sending. This is sickening because to do anything robust you must avoid Alexa's native NLP system. And I don't believe LEX is advanced much beyond it. You're caught in a bind. This is what will set Alexa back perhaps in the long run with respect to natural conversation. We've been preparing our skis in stealth mode, and an Amazon rep said our approach was a "hack" and may not get certification when published. I'm not yet sure what the answer is. Does this raw text issue exist with Google Home or other voice platforms? Beware.
"Alexa for Business is intended to enable organizations to take advantage of Amazon’s voice enabled assistant, Alexa. Alexa for Business provides Alexa capabilities that make workers more productive, while working alongside all of the other capabilities that Alexa has today like music, smart home controls, shopping, and thousands of third party skills.
Amazon Lex is intended to help build custom conversational interfaces and chat bots for use cases like call centers or application based bots. Bots built with Lex can be highly customized and exist separately from Alexa but they do not take advantage of Alexa’s built in capabilities or third party skills. Both Alexa for Business and Amazon Lex use Amazon’s deep learning capabilities that provide Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU)."
I'm writing an app wherein the premise is that people who can't directly fund a charity out of their pocket could automatically work on Amazon AWS HITs in order to bring clean water to the 3rd world - I'd known there was an Amazon AWS API but is very unclear on how to retrieve a HIT to be worked on, rather than just consume some data about some tasks I'm trying to complete.
Is there any way to retrieve a HIT to be worked on through the AWS API or otherwise?
Thanks ahead of time.
As far as I know, the only way to work on a HIT is through the mTurk website. i.e. - not via API.
There is a site that is trying to do something very similar to what you have described. http://www.sparked.com/