This may be an extremely basic question, but I am not able to find the answer. Even if you can point me in the direction of documentation, I'd be grateful.
I have set up AlexaPi on a Raspberry Pi and am trying to code a bunch of skills for local use (a bit like the example here though not precisely that).
What I am not able to understand is how I ensure that my skill does not become "public" and end up being used by accident by thousands of people. This is particularly the case because some of the skills are interactions for my kids. The Alexa documentation doesn't seem to clearly state how one limits the devices on which a skill is used. It talks of "private skills" but these are only for Alexa for Business users.
Am I missing something clearly elementary?
You skill is never public until you publish it. Then it goes to a certification queue and, if approved, it will be live. Your skill is by default only visible to devices that have been configured with the account that you used to develop the skill at developer.amazon.com/alexa
You can safely use your skill privately in devices configured with that account and the sill will never be public (until you explicitly go to the Distribution tab and publish it)
If you don't want the public to use don't publish it. keep it in dev skills. The only problem of this is you need to pair the Alexa with the same account where you created the skills
Related
Is it possible for alexa user to have different responses based on config in the app. For example my skill is returning measurements. Some users may prefer metric and others imperial. I'd like users to be able to specify this (and may be some other things) to give a personalised experience. Can this be configured in the Amazon Alexa app?
I was thinking I might have to have some persistent storage for this (DDB for example) which would mean the app would write to the DDB and the skill would read from it to get the personalised response.
Thanks
Can this be configured in the Amazon Alexa app?
Unfortunately not in the way which you seem to be suggesting.
If you really wanted users to set preferences through the app, this could be done through account linking. However, it is generally discouraged (Alexa is meant to be "Voice-First") and likely to present additional obstacles if what you're wanting to do is allow users to set preferences for different devices.
However, using persistent storage for user preferences in generally is a good idea and as you've suggested, DynamoDB can do this.
If you take this approach you could ask users what their preferences are the first time they use a skill on a device and store this together with the device ID.
There is some good information about device ID in the Amazon documentation and some helpful tips here:
Get unique device id for every amazon echo devices
I'm working for a startup and we have a customer who uses Demandware for their online store.
Our company provides vouchers which are worth a specific amount of money. So customers on the retail site can enter the voucher number near the end of the checkout experience and if it's worth, say, 10 dollars, their shopping cart is updated (-10).
I have the CTO saying we just need to "drop a few lines of javascript" onto the retailer online store. But I think this requires a Demandware plugin (especially updating a shopping cart), which involves signing up for a developer or partnership account (which takes some time), learning Demand Script and building the plugin, then releasing it to Saleforce's app store. Am I correct? Is this the only way to achieve this?
Just to be clear, the functionality is: the voucher code box needs to take a voucher number, an API request is made to our service to check what it's worth, then update the cart.
That's a pretty broad question but I'll try to explain.
First off, Demandware has gone all JavaScript.
But yeah, it has a huge API so the process sounds about right the way you've described it.
Ask your client whether they have a service integrator they're working with, because that would be their job. Your job would be to provide an API so that Demandware can check whether the voucher code is valid.
Demandware is a closed community so it's unlikely to learn it unless you're working in a company that is doing Demandware development.
Oh, and if it somehow ends up being your job to develop this, a tip from me - you probably need to get access to their site's files and use the LineItemCtnr class to createPriceAdjustment() :)
The first tip from me is that Demandware got bought by Salesforce and is now branded as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, so if you hear either, they are the same thing.
You are right that you are going to have to work with Salesforce to get going. They are a cloud provider and there is no self-hosted version of the platform, so in order to do any development, you need to have a relationship with them.
So then it depends on how you get access. If the client has any sandbox environments they are willing to share with you, you could do this as a custom build working in their environment, modifying cart code to make the service call as you ask and as the previous response suggests. But then (depending on the terms you have with the client) your company may or may not be able to reuse that code for other clients. You will also have to work with them to get that integrated into their existing site, get it deployed through their processes, etc.
If you want to write something that other Commerce Cloud clients could use, then you should set up your own partner relationship with Salesforce and get a software package they call a cartridge to what they call their LINK marketplace, which is basically a big clearinghouse of integrations like yours.
Technology-wise, the platform has gone through some changes recently, going from an XML-based GUI tool to specify business logic to using CommonJS scripts to define them. If your client is a new client within the last year or two they probably have this new fully javascript implementation, but if they are an older client than that they may be using the old way, which has a steeper (read: more proprietary) learning curve.
My understanding is that Amazon ASK still does not provide:
The raw user input
An option for a fallback intent
An API to
dynamically add possible options from which Alexa can be better
informed to select an intent.
Is this right or am I missing out on knowing about some critical capabilities?
Actions on Google w/ Dialogflow provides:
raw user input for analysis: request.body.result.resolvedQuery
fallback intents:
https://dialogflow.com/docs/intents#fallback_intents
An APi to dynamically add user expressions (aka sample utterances): PUT
/intents/{id}
These tools provide devs with the ability to check to see if the identified intent is correct and if not fix it.
I know there have been a lot of questions asked previously, just a few here:
How to add slot values dynamically to alexa skill
Can Alexa skill handler receive full user input?
Amazon Alexa dynamic variables for intent
I have far more users on my Alexa skill than my AoG app simply because of Amazon's dominance to date in the market - but their experience falls short of a Google Assistant user experience because of these limitations. I've been waiting for almost a year for new Alexa capabilities here, thinking that after Amazon's guidance to not use AMAZON.LITERAL there would be improvements coming to custom slots. To date it still looks like this old blog post is still the only guidance given. With Google, I dynamically pull in utterance options from a db that are custom for a given user following account linking. By having the user's raw input, I can correct the choice of intent if necessary.
If you've wanted these capabilities but have had to move forward without them, what tricks do you have to get accurate intent handling with Amazon when you don't know what the user will say?
EDIT 11/21/17:
In September Amazon announced the Alexa Skill Management API (SMAPI) which does provide the 3rd bullet above.
Actually this should be better a comment but i write to less at stackoverflow to be able to comment. I am with you on all.
But Amazons Alexa has also a very big advance.
The intent Schema is seeming to directly influence the Voice to Text recognition. Btw. can someone confirm if this is correct?
At Google Home it seems not to be the case.
So matching of unusual names is even more complicated than at alexa.
And it sometimes just recognize absolute bullshit.
Not sure which I prefer currently.
My feeling is for small apps is Alexa much better, because it better match the Intent phrases when it has lesser choices.
But for large Intent schemas, it get really trouble and in my tests some of the intents were not matched at all correct.
Here the google home and action SDK wins, probably? Cause Speech to text seem to be done before and than a string pattern to intent schema matching is happening. So this is probably more robust for larger schemas?
To get something like an answer on your questions:
You can try to add as much as possible that can be said to a slot. And than match the result from the Alexa request to your database via Jaro winkler or some other string distance.
Was I tried for Alexa was to find phrases that are close to what the user say. And this i added as phrases to fill a slot.
So a module in our webpage was an intent in the schema. And Than I requested To say what exactly should be done in that module (this was the slot filling request). The Answer was the slot filling utterance.
For me that was slightly better working than the regulary intent schema. But it require more talking so i dont like it so much.
Let me go straight to answering your 3 questions:
1) Alexa does provide the raw input via the slot type AMAZON.Literal but it's now deprecated and you're advised to use AMAZON.SearchQuery for free form capture. However, if instead of using SearchQuery you define a custom slot type and provide samples (training data) the ASR will work better.
2) Alexa supports FallbackIntent since I believe May 2018. The way it work is by automatically generating a model for your skill where out-of-domain requests are routed through a fallback intent. It works well
3) Dynamically adding slot type values is not feasible since when you provide samples you're really providing training data for a model than will be able to then process similar values beyond the ones you defined. If you noticed when you provide a voice interaction model schema then you have to build the model (in this step the training data provided in the samples is used to create the model). One example, when you define a custom slot of type "Car" and you provide the samples "Toyota", "Jeep", "Chevrolet" and "Honda" then, the system will also go to the same intent if the user says "Ford"
Note: SMAPI does allow to get and update the interaction model, so technically you could download the model via API, modify it with new training data, upload it again and rebuild the model. This is kind of awkward though
Does anyone know of any documentation of how to access bank data via some sort of webservice or other method for use in a Silverlight financial / banking application? Is there any sort of standard protocol or terminology used for this that I can look up online. I'm having trouble finding any sort of information on how this is typically done.
"Access bank data"... Not exactly something banks allow from the outside world. They kinda want to keep things secure :)
If you work for a bank you may well have access to various web services internally. There are standards for data transfers, but every bank will likely have it's own systems.
I'm having trouble finding any sort of information on how this is typically done.
That's probably a good thing. This is typically done by either internal bank developers or consultants. For example, take the Bank of America Windows Phone 7 app (which is a Silverlight app): it connects to BofA's servers, but I would be surprised if the way in which it connects is public information. Because you can use it to check your account, I can only presume that there is a web service hosted somewhere that allows these clients to get this data. I'm pretty confident, however, that the connection is secured, and the details of it are kept hidden for good reason.
In short, banks don't usually expose web services to the outside world for public consumption. Unless you've been hired by a bank to specifically do this, I'm not sure you should be able to.
Is there a way to block compete.com or alexa from getting the traffic on my website? For competitive reasons, I don't want anyone knowing that info. I don't have advertising, just a paid-only site....would blocking compete.com or alexa in anyway affect my search engine rankings?
Is there a way to block compete.com or alexa from getting the traffic on my website
As far as I know, Alexa and Compete.com both use user-installed toolbars that analyze what sites the user visits (similar to how TV Ratings are done; see e.g. the Wikipedia article on the Alexa Toolbar). They do not fetch your traffic numbers as such; they estimate their own.
To mess with their counting process, you would have to block users with the Alexa Toolbar installed. While that may be possible, it's foolish in the extreme: You would be locking out innocent users, and decrease your Alexa ratings, which wouldn't affect them in the slightest.
Yes you can do it easily and automatically without having to contact them.
For Alexa, you can do it using robot.txt
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
The toolbar plugin is used to monitor traffic.
I don't have details for the others, but I've just found some information about robot.txt for Compete, Quantcast and Alexa: look a the end of this article for practical details.
Please note that by adding that in your robot.txt it will also force them to remove all data they gathered retroactively.
This is useful for websites like archive.org (linked to Alexa, in fact ia in ia_archiver stands for Internet Archive). They explain the process here: http://www.archive.org/about/exclude.php
Please note that in most countries, being able to remove your data from databases is a legal right.