I am creating in which a user can say an address (for further processing). An address can be anything from "New York" to "123 First Avenue Washington" to "Seattle Harbor". Basically like something you can enter at Google Maps - it will recognize more or less everything :)
So now of course comes the problem on how to create a custom slot for this? LITERAL is deprecated PLUS I am working on a German language skill.
Should I actually try to fill the 50,000 lines I got available for a custom skill with as many enumerations of addresses as I can come up with? I'm afraid that even if I go down that road, Alexa will still try to map any input that's not in that list to one that is - and thereby rendering my skill a bit mood :(
Thanks for any advise!
As you suggest, using a custom slot with 50K sample addresses wouldn't really work. Something as complicated as an address really needs a built-in slot type, and there is one for US skills:
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/docs/built-in-intent-ref/slot-type-reference#postaladdress
But you noted that you are targeting a German language skill and as far as I know there isn't a German language or address version of the above built-in slot yet.
The fact that they have done it for US suggests that they will add it for Germany at some point, but counting on that is risky, of course, so you are in a difficult position. In the mean-time I would suggest you go to the feature request space and add a request for a German version of the above:
Related
I am working on a chatbot that uses both Watson conversation and NLU. My chatbot is designed to provide information about other people - friends, colleagues (ex: their current position, contact number etc.,). Chat bot isnt able to recognize few names as persons. How do I handle this situation ? Any thoughts ?
NLU does recognize person pretty good, if you are using Watson Conversation along with NLU, I am not sure how you are combining both of them. Can you explain it a bit more?
I faced a similar situation using NLU, here are the few ways I overcame it
1.NLU relies on context, instead of sending smaller texts, send bigger texts.
2. It also relies on Grammatical features, usually having correct punctuation, First letter capital names for Person, City Names helped me get better results
Is it possible and if so how to respond within a skill with different languages? For example I'm developing a skill for the German skill store which reads various texts from the internet. Those can be any in language and I can determine the language when I'm about to emit the response.
From what I can see the SSML subset Alexa implements does not specify the language in which the response is given. But Alexa's own Kindle skill is able to read me eBooks in either German or English (perhaps Amazon's own skills are special).
As said in other answers the right way is to use the <lang> tag in SSML. However since the english voice do not speak German it is quite weird. The right solution is to change the voice using <voice> tag.
Here is an example in German
<speak>
<voice name="Hans"><lang xml:lang="de-DE">Ich bin ein Berliner</lang></voice>.
I am a Berliner.
</speak>
It is described in this doc https://developer.amazon.com/fr/docs/custom-skills/speech-synthesis-markup-language-ssml-reference.html#examplefrench-content-in-an-english-skill
It looks like this is not possible at the moment: https://forums.developer.amazon.com/questions/55086/specify-output-language-per-intent.html
You can use the <lang> tag in SSML for this.
Here is an example in German.
<speak>
<lang xml:lang="de-DE">Mein Luftkissenfahrzeug ist voller Aale</lang>.
Hello in the default language.
</speak>
Here is a list of supported Amazon Polly languages for Alexa.
I've briefly looked around for an answer to this and it doesn't seem to be doable, but figured I'd ask on here. I am about to launch a survey on qualtrics, but would prefer, if at all possible, to customize the URL address for my survey. I would like to do this only because I plan on printing out a few advertisements to display around campus, and requiring people to then go back to their computers and type in a lengthy and complex web address is not exactly ideal.
Cheers
Use a url shortening service like goo.gl.
How's it going?
I've found a lot of more detailed answers relating to specific problems relating to RSS feeds, but I can't really figure out how you USE one, basically.
Could someone explain?
I see the RSS feed icon at the top of a lot of Wordpress sites, including my own, but when I click it, it just seems to be a long XML file. I don't know what to do with it, or even why it would be there.
How do you use this? Are you meant to hit it with an API request, or is there a particular kind of software that you use?
Cheers
Before telling you what RSS, let me describe you a common problem that many people have.
Say there is a bunch of sites that you really like and it's sort of a
daily routine for you to go thru them. They may be a news site, your
friend's blog, but also craigslist bcause you're currently looking for
a new house and maybe a weather site to know how late you should stay
at work :)
The first thing you do when you get to work, is open your web browser
and these sites in new tabs. It's not particularly cumbersome because
there are just 4 sites. But think about it: maybe there is a new blog
that you start to like and ho, these cartoons are really funny. Maybe
there is also a bit of financial info that you're interested in and
the pictures that your brother is posting to Flickr every couple day:
they just had a new baby! Also, as you're trying to buy a house, you'd
love a little raise and you've figured that your boss really likes it
when you tell her that you've read about your company in the news or
when you tell her about a new competing product... There is also
StackOverflow. You're desperately trying to get this "expert" badge
and boost up your reputation: this may help with your boss too or even
when you're looking for a new job.
Opening all these tabs is starting to take a toll and you keep
forgetting an important one. You're also slowly getting tired of the
different reading experience that all these sites have: small fonts,
large fonts, ads all over...etc. Now you have a problem.
Imagine there is a tool that does the following: you can tell it what sites you care about, and then, this tool will look up the new stuff for you. It will show everything in a nice looking format. It should also help you identify what's really worth seeing ASAP or maybe have some kind of "serendipity" mode that you can go into and find interesting stuff that you would have missed otherwise. The tool will obviously send you to the original sites should you need more info about any particular story or classified...
This tool exists. It's usually called a Reader, mostly because it lets your read more things online. Often times you'll see them called "RSS reader", because RSS is what they use to get the information from all these sites. RSS is the pipe. You as a user should probably not know about it, but that's what the readers depend on. In an ideal world, when you're on site you like, you should just hit "follow" on a button like this one and then you'd be redirected to your reader of choice. Later when new content is added, you'll get it straight in your reader.
To get a bit into more technical details, RSS (like Atom) is an XML flavor. It's a collection (mostly reverse chronological) of entries. Entries have at least a title and a link to the actual story. They should also include a unique identifier and could have other elements like a description, an image, tags, author information... etc.
RSS is great because it's content agnostic. It can be used to represent a lot of different things (as described in the little story) and decouples the publishing platform from the subscribing platform: they don't even know the other one exists. RSS is their lingua-franca.
I wrote a blog post about this very question not long ago. Here's the link if you're interested in reading my personal interpretation. https://www.rss.com/whatisrss
An XML file is all the content of a page, with no markup. The XML represents the data in its rawest, most descriptive form. Many readers can interpret XML sources from a variety of places, and format all of the data in its own unique way.
For some reason we still don't have this feature yet. We can make it work using zip codes, but how about City or State? The Views set of Modules are great and I would love to see Proximity Search options expanded. There are requests for this in the Drupal forums: http://drupal.org/node/489904 but that thread has been stagnant for months. The "fix" is inconsistent and no longer works on my end, using Views and Location series modules. Does anyone know a workaround to this issue? The custom module shown in Drupal forum worked at some point with limitations, but now its no longer displaying any search results. Trying to hit this from any angle -- have the US zipcodes in MySQL database for the former configuration; have Apache SOLR ready to go; even got Spatial SOLR ready to go if that ever picks up. Any help much appreciated.
I think one of the problems is city names are not necessarily unique. (zips are)
You could have the same city in different states.
For states, it's even less reliable because their area can vary a great deal and proximity search around a state would be very unreliable for states which don't have circular shapes.
So the module should have an extra step showing "did you mean.." results in case there are more returned (if possible).
I don't believe there is a workaround, it will require some coding to implement this in views.
I would start in location.views.inc around line #493, adapting the logic for the current zipcode handler. Look for the location_latlon_rough function in location.inc.
May be you have to try geoname module im not sure you should try
http://geonames.edesign.no/node/13
Give a try
Thanks,
Gobi :)