Queries re: Roku Web APIs & Push Notifications - web-services

All,
As a newbie to Roku developer world, I have a bunch of queries re: Roku API.
The overall goal I am trying to achieve (by using these APIs) is as follows,
Cancel a Roku Subscription by pinging some API with some parameters from our systems
Refund money to Roku subscribers (either partially or completely) using some API
Get notified by Roku when,
We get money from subscribers (at beginning of a new billing cycle)
Subscribers are refunded money (for whatever reason)
Subscribers have cancelled their subscription (from Roku directly)
I have been trying to go through their API docs & I am not able to see any consistent way of doing things. This is the doc I am referring to
So I am wondering if their is a new/updated exhaustive version of their API.
Additionally if you can help me with following questions as well,
What is the difference between "Issue Credit" & "Issue Refund"?
What is the difference between the following Push notifications - "Sale", "Credit" & "Refund"?
Is their a Java based client SDK for interacting with the Web APIs (& Push notifications)?

I was able to get some answers from the Roku folks. Hope this helps someone else.
The link referred to earlier, is the current documentation on web services APIs & push notifications.
"Issue Credit" gives the users some credit to be used towards another roku product. "Issue Refund" gives users actual money.
"Sale" is for when user has bought some product & we as app-developer get money. "Credit" & "Refund" should be obvious from the previous point.
There is no Java based client SDK by Roku.

Related

Does Google Dialogflow have intent recommendation?

I'm switching from IBM Watson Assistant to Google Dialogflow. In WA there's a feature called intent recommendation, which taps into live instances, detects the topics/intents that users want, and groups them together into new recommended intents. You can also upload utterances in spreadsheets and intent recommendation does the same thing. Does Dialogflow have something similar?
Likely the closest to your needs is the GCP Product called Contact Center AI Insights. If we look at this documentation page:
https://cloud.google.com/contact-center/insights/docs/topic-modeling-overview
we find that this product has a feature called "Topic Modeling". This allows us to examine the current and historic conversation transcriptions and, from that:
Monitoring topic trends to keep your agents updated.
Supporting agent
training as new topics are observed.
Using topics and their
distribution to help define Dialogflow intents.
You can also deploy your created topic model to infer topics on new conversations, allowing you to continually classify incoming conversations.

How do I change a donation amount down the road?

I'm building a website to allow people to donate to a local charity quickly and easily. The charity allows direct donations, but it's primary function is to do "per mile" style donations, but with pull ups. In that past, they have collected the pledges ("I'll pay $1 per pull up"), then manual contacted people for payment after the event. This isn't very slick and very time consuming.
What I'd like to be able to do is collect a pledge and payment information, then charge people automatically after the event. From what I've seen, I should put a hold/authorization on their account, then capture it with the appropriate amount after the event. But reauthorizing will only allow up to 115% of the original, and I can't very well just authorize a large amount and let it sit for two months before reauthorizing and capturing it.
I know this can be done, but I haven't messed with this side of things before, and the REST API from paypal doesn't have an obvious solution. Is there something I'm missing? Should I be going about this a different way?
You can use reference transactions. I would recommend sticking with the Classic API for now, though. REST isn't as mature yet and doesn't have all the same functionality quite yet.
So in the classic API you would use Express Checkout and/or Payments Pro. You can process an original authorization and then simply void it, or use the card verification process with Payments Pro.
You won't need to capture an original amount, so you won't need to worry about the 115% cap on the capture.
Instead, you'll use the DoReferenceTransaction API to process any amount you need to at any time from that user's account account.
With Express Checkout you have to be sure to include a billing agreement in the setup. This guide outlines that whole process.
With Payments Pro you just do the original card verification / auth and then pass that auth ID into the DoReferenceTransaction API.
In either case, if you're working with PHP this PayPal PHP SDK will make all of the API calls very quick and easy for you.

Amazon Echo - Push a message to the device

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&#17713
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.

Facebook Graph API-Account suspension

I have a .Net application that uses list of names/email addresses and finds there match on Facebook using the graph API. During testing, my list had 900 names...I was checking facebook matches for each name in in a loop...The process completed...After that when I opened my Facebook page...it gave me message that my account has been suspended due to suspicious activities?
What am I doing wrong here? Doesn't facebook allow to search large number requests to their server? And 900 doesn't seem to be a big number either..
per the platform policies: https://developers.facebook.com/policy/ this may be the a suspected breach of their "Principals" section.
See Policies I.5
If you exceed, or plan to exceed, any of the following thresholds
please contact us by creating confidential bug report with the
"threshold policy" tag as you may be subject to additional terms: (>5M
MAU) or (>100M API calls per day) or (>50M impressions per day).
Also IV.5
Facebook messaging (i.e., email sent to an #facebook.com address) is
designed for communication between users, and not a channel for
applications to communicate directly with users.
Then the biggie, V. Enforcement. No surprise, it's both automated and also monitored by humans. So maybe seeing 900+ requests coming from your app.
What I'd recommend doing:
Storing what you can client side (in a cache or data store) so you make fewer calls to the API.
Put logging on your API calls so you, the developer, can see exactly what is happening. You might be surprise at what you find there.

Authorize.net ARB API Integration Question

I'm integrating with Authorize.net's ARB API. Authorize.net processes their transactions at a certain time everyday, so when people create a subscription, their transaction is not real time.
I am creating a subscription based model, does their API tell me whether their CC has been processed? Or should I put a delay on the access to my site until they have processed all the ARB transactions that day.
Thanks in advance!
You should be charging their first subscription payment via the AIM API. This will give you instant feedback as to whether or not the payment was good. Assuming it was successful you then can use ARB to create their subscription by setting the start date to be the date of their next scheduled payment.
This serves two purposes:
If the card is bad you know immediately and can have the user provide a new card while they are still on your website. Once they leave your site it gets much more difficult to get them back to correct it.
You can give them instant access without worrying about whether or not their card is approved or not.
FYI, you can use Silent Post to determine the status of payments made via ARB.