By @edent · Amazon customer service language · 6 comments · 450 words
Way back in the 1990s, my family visited the USA. It seemed at every single large shop there was a person stood inside whose sole job was to say "Welcome to STORENAME! How are you doing today? We're so pleased to have you shop with us!" - their face plastered with an enormous grin. It […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI alexa Amazon Mary Robinette Kowal · 4 comments · 350 words · read ~616 times.
I speak English. My Amazon account is set to English. My Alexa listens to my English commands and replies in English. Except for new book notifications. I saw a pulsing yellow light on the dot. I've memorised all of the various signs and portents the accurs'd device can summon up, so I asked it (in […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Amazon HowTo python wishlist · 3 comments · 1,500 words · read ~1,168 times.
Scratching my own itch. I want an alert when there's been a price drop on an item on my Amazon wishlist. I couldn't find an easy way to get an email directly from Amazon (customer-focused my shiny metal arse) so I knocked something up in Python. This is heavily inspired by Leigh Dodds' Wishlist Monitor. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · alexa Amazon privacy ux · 9 comments · 500 words · read ~4,249 times.
This morning, my wife noticed that Alexa was insistently flashing its little blue lights. "Alexa... Notifications?" "You have one notification. An item on your wishlist has dropped in price. The … is now only £…" And that's how my wife found out what I planned to get her for her birthday! What happened to cause […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI Amazon tts turing · 500 words
I've been experimenting with Amazon's Polly service. It's their fancy text-to-sort-of-human-style-speech system. Think "Alexa" but with a variety of voices, genders, and accents. Here's "Brian" - their English, male, received pronunciation voice - reading John Betjeman's poem "Slough": The pronunciation of all the words is incredibly lifelike. If you heard it on the radio, it […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Amazon BBC bug hdmi iplayer · 2 comments · 250 words · read ~1,064 times.
Technology never works right. And video technology never works right even harder. The Amazon 4K Fire Stick is a pretty cool bit of kit. It's an Android device which can push 4K HDR video with surround sound to your TV. But, like any technology, it's buggy. Here's the bug report I've tried to send to […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Amazon bug unicode · 1 comment · 400 words · read ~389 times.
It's 2019 and high-tech devices are still plagued by text encoding bugs. I recently bought the new 4K Amazon Fire Stick. It's a little Android dongle which plays videos. It's neat - but quite often displays weird text errors. Take the kids' TV show House of Anubis, the Fire displays the description like this: Looking […]
Continue reading →By @edent · alexa Amazon api battery hack NaBloPoMo solar · 450 words · read ~235 times.
Amazon Alexa is a fun little bit of kit. But it can be tricky getting it to work with all your smart devices. Not every company has an Alexa skill - just like not every company has an app. Using Flask-Ask it is possible to bring Alexa smarts to a range of previously mute devices. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · alexa Amazon api council Open Data oxford · 5 comments · 750 words · read ~1,316 times.
Bin day is the most magical time of the week! Children of all ages cry "Which bins is it?! Oh! Which bins?" Is today recycling day? Or green waste day? Or humble landfill day? Should my food caddy go out? Gosh! Who can keep track? I mean, obviously I could look at my calendar. Or […]
Continue reading →By @edent · alexa Amazon Open Data · 500 words · read ~255 times.
You can now get the UK's flood forecast as part of your Flash Briefing on Amazon's Alexa. I've tried previously to create an interactive Alexa skill - it did not go well. This time, I thought I'd create an easier skill - a Flash Briefing. You ask Alexa for your daily news report and it […]
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