With the public release of Alexa Widgets announced for developers this week, I thought it would be a good time to write a little about my experience working with the fine folks at Amazon on the world’s first third party Alexa widget that we developed and deployed at Cookpad 16 months before this public release back in December 2021. Update: Amazon published an interview I did with them about widgets on their blog Three questions...
Custom skills with Amazon Echo devices provide a great way for users to interact with your product or service by voice. This is something particularly true at Cookpad where users are cooking, so their hands are often busy or messy with ingredients. Voice provides an excellent way to interact with a recipe while cooking. Conversely, searching by voice is really not a great experience. We’re all used to searching websites and perusing lists of results,...
Alexa and GPT There are a myriad of possibilities that seem to be available with the explosion of Chat GPT, and like everyone else, I wanted to see what I could do with it as soon as I got access to the API. Use Case My first idea was to try and implement a way to ask Alexa for substitutions in the currently selected recipe. This is a really useful feature and simple enough to...