I'm writing an alexa skill for my local public transit directions. I'm defining the Train Stations with a custom slot like this -
LIST_OF_STOPS - 14th Street | 23rd Street | 33rd Street | Christopher Street | Exchange Place
I have a strong suspicion that Alexa is going to have a hard time understanding the ones like 14th Street, is there documentation or guidelines around how these should be defined?
There is not any documentation. Most people do it by trial and error. The only obscurely documented quirk is that "a.", "b.", etc can be used for the letters.
That being said, I think that those values look to be pretty OK. The one thing you need to be aware of is that Alexa takes the list of custom values "under advisement". It is not a definitive list. Alexa will happily return values other than what is on the list. So you are going to need a fuzzy matcher anyway so you can handle '23 street', and things like that.
I would try the simple list you have, and see if you are happy with the results. If not, you might make one intent that is {slot} street, another for {slot} place, etc. That might improve things. But it might not. You need to iterate and try a bunch of things and see.
Related
The HERE api seems really picky about what is uses for the q parameter in API calls. According to the documentation you can use a street address, partial address, name of place, etc (documentation: https://developer.here.com/documentation/places/topics/free-text-search.html)
Im trying to take an address and return the name of the store, building, business at that location (a few million of these) In some cases I have a human typed name of the place at the address but this can be quite messy and inaccurate in a lot of cases so Im trying not to use this information. Address however Im quite confident in.
in summary Im trying to provide here with an input like "15300 Cedar Ave, Apple Valley, MN 55124" and output "Best Buy"
Here seems to be really finicky on what your q input is..
When I put in the address and geocode info, Best Buy doesn’t appear on the results list
q=15300 Cedar Ave, Apple Valley, MN 55124
in=44.7287,-93.2147;r=800
https://places.demo.api.here.com/places/v1/discover/search?q=15300+Cedar+Ave%2C+Apple+Valley%2C+MN+55124&in=44.7287%2C-93.2147%3Br%3D800&Accept-Language=en-US%2Cen%3Bq%3D0.9&app_id=DemoAppId01082013GAL&app_code=AJKnXv84fjrb0KIHawS0Tg
Based on this Im thinking maybe this info just isnt in here's database, but when I run this query which includes best buy in the search it finds it right away at the correct address!!
q=best buy 15300 Cedar Ave, Apple Valley, MN 55124
in=44.7287,-93.2147;r=800
https://places.demo.api.here.com/places/v1/discover/search?q=best+buy+15300+Cedar+Ave%2C+Apple+Valley%2C+MN+55124&in=44.7287%2C-93.2147%3Br%3D800&Accept-Language=en-US%2Cen%3Bq%3D0.9&app_id=DemoAppId01082013GAL&app_code=AJKnXv84fjrb0KIHawS0Tg
It seems like a no-brainer to me that HERE would use the q value as an address search but that doesnt always appear to be the case. Looking for guidance on how to make this smarter
if the point of interest(POI) needs to be searched by specific address, then q is significant for fetching the records. As the API will fetch only those records which have those keywords in that area.
if POIs need to be searched at specific lat-long and around defined meter range, then q is not significant.
https://places.demo.api.here.com/places/v1/discover/around?in=44.7287%2C-93.2147%3Br%3D800&Accept-Language=en-US%2Cen%3Bq%3D0.9&app_id=DemoAppId01082013GAL&app_code=AJKnXv84fjrb0KIHawS0Tg
Is it mandatory for you to pass address all the time, or lat-long can also work ?
I have defined an intent in Watson Assistant using the following training examples:
adieu
au revoir
bye
bye now
ciao
cu
cya
exit
farewell
good bye
have a nice day
I'm leaving
later
quit
see you
so long
stop
we are done
A user inputs the word "again". Watson returns a match to this intent with a confidence level of about .9
The word "again" does appear in a training example for a completely different intent, namely "I'm looking forward to working with you again! :)". It does not appear in any other training example.
What is the reasoning used by Watson Assistant to arrive at this match and with such a high level of confidence?
There is a whole load of factors that determine why an intent is picked over the other.
Intents do not work properly if you have <= 2 intents.
Any entities you have created that are referenced in the example questions can also impact what is picked.
Contextual entities will also add weight to the POS of those entities.
Number of intents and how frequently the word is used across those intents can also impact the scoring.
Watson Assistant always tries to get meaning from the term where it can.
When trying to determine why it picked one intent over another, you need to look at both. The intent you mention may not even be the second one picked.
With just one intent shown above it's hard to say the 'Why', so this is just an educated guess as to what may be happening.
"again" is a single word and by itself has no context to determine an intent. The closest in the list would be "later".
It couldn't find any meaning whatsoever in a single word, so looked at the intent with the most single word examples, as possible reason to pick it.
That aside, you should try not to answer real 1-2 keyword based questions. There is almost never any context that a person could answer, so it's unlikely WA will be able to either.
I have a CSV list of university names around the world - about 13,000 university names. I'm looking for a way to pull the addresses of these universities. Google Maps API / Google Places API looks promising, but requires lat/long to map the locations.
End game is to mark to each school as a 1 if the school is in the US, and 0 if the school is outside of the US.
Any thoughts on how to search these colleges in maps and pull out the addresses - or at least the country?
Example:
is there nothing else in the csv, only the names? that's going to make it hard, i'd bet the names aren't always unique in the world.
you could write something that had different passes at biting the apple - for instance, if the university has a state name in it, check those off as 1's - then find another logic to use to take "another bit" until the apple is gone.
On top of #WEBjuju's answer, since you only want to mark if the school is in US, or outside of US, you can use the "country" type in Place Types in the Google Places API, by setting the option as country='us'.
https://developers.google.com/places/supported_types?csw=1#table2
You may also want to cross check with this list of schools.
https://www.4icu.org/reviews/index2.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_universities_and_colleges_by_country
I'm trying to create some skills for my Echo (for my own use, I'm not concerned about the invocation names not getting through review). I've set my invocation name as "the car" (I also tried "car"). I wanted to be able to ask what my battery status is and order Alexa to pre-heat the car (a Renault ZOE).
It seems no matter what I put in for my utterances, I always get the same responses:
Anything with "battery" in gets "I don't have a battery"
Anything with "heat" in gets "You have no smarthome devices, blah blah"
It seems like the words "battery" and "heat" result in things never matching my skill (even when I said the invocation name).
Is there anything I can do so that it will route actions along the lines of the above to my skill?
Edit: Today I get different results trying "preheat the car".. I just get a weird tone. It never calls my skill, nor shows anything in the Home section of the app. What does this tone mean?
Video here: https://twitter.com/DanTup/status/804615557605654528
With help from Reddit I managed to get this working reasonably well. the car was a bad invocation name and I wasn't following the documented way for invoking skills (joining words etc. are fairly restrictive).
I'm now using my car as the invocation name and can do the following:
Alexa tell my car to preheat
Alexa ask my car for battery
As of Dec 2017, it's still not possible to have completely custom phrases with Alexa. Google Assistant/Home does support this however, via shortcuts.
I would like to use GraceNote to generate play-lists which contain songs likely to appeal to, or, at least, be known to, residents of a given country. E.G, Japan, Korea, Turkey, Brazil, France ...
They don't necessarily have to be in the local language, as I don't think that I can do that with GraceNote (can I ?), but local artists would be nice. Is there any way, for instance, to query and generate a playlist using artist origin?
I realize that something like Gangnam Style might be known in most countries ;-) and that play-list generation is inexact when used this way, but I would be happy with a 70 or 80% "I know that song" reaction.
Can it be done? If so, how? #cweichen, can you help?
It seems likely you are referring the the Rhythm API. As you probably can see from the function definition, you cannot create a playlist using 'ARTIST_ORIGIN'.
The closest thing I can think of is creating a playlist (aka radio station) using on a popular song in the given country as a seed.
You may try configuring the 'focus_similarity' value to get a wider variety of songs. This is just a suggestion and I am not sure if this will get you what your looking for.
*Pygn currently does not support 'focus_similarity' configuration but it should not be too difficult to add yourself.