Trigger Alexa speaking - alexa-skills-kit

I'd like to be able to remotely cause Alexa to say something on my Echo.
A specific use case would be to notify my wife that I'm leaving work. I currently use Waze to do this, but it would be very convenient if Alexa could be triggered to say "Ron is on his way home" also.
I've talked with people about this, and I don't think Amazon supports this yet. I'm posting here to give us a place to find out if/when that support happens, or inform us if it is somehow possible now.

This is currently not possible. However, you could launch a skill via a Routine.
An Alexa routine consists of a trigger and a sequence of actions. The trigger is an event such as a time of day (for example, 7:00 AM) or a user request such as, "Alexa, start my Morning Session".
Please check the following blog post for further details:
https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/blogs/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/2019/10/tell-your-customers-they-can-now-invoke-your-skill-from-routines
https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/custom-skills/integrate-custom-task-with-alexa-routines.html#what-are-alexa-routines

Related

How to set day and time reminder in Alexa using IBM Watson Assistant?

How to set reminder for day(Weekdays like Monday, Tuesday etc..) and time in Alexa using IBM Watson Assistant? I am able to set date and time in IBM Watson Assistant using system entities like #sys-date and #sys-time.The context variables like $day and $time have been used to fetch and store the data. Challenge is that Alexa must fetch these values and set the reminder. Please help.
Specific points for which help required is:-
Setting the reminder for day and time in Alexa using IBM Watson assistant.
If reminder already exists then Alexa must be able to tell that. Still user intends to set another reminder, then Alexa must be able to set the fresh reminder.
If user intends to cancel the existing remidner. Then Alexa must be able to cancel that from Watson Assistant.
Forgive me I am not 100% sure what you are asking, so if I have this wrong forgive me. I take it from your posting that you have linked your Alexa instance back to an instance of Watson. ( Which is doable as developer, but Amazon at present will not allow this to become an Alexa Skill). If I understand right, you then wish to call back into Alexa and set up a reminder for a time and date. I have not tried this, (but may do so for my Alexa+Watson demos), but expect you would need to call out via a cloud function or AWS lambda to the Alexa Reminders API and then understand the response from this call out, and then return a message back to Alexa.
Hope this answers your question.

How often can I ping Google Calendar without getting banned?

We are writing our custom scheduling app for our website.
Necessarily, it requests Google Calendar data to see when one of our 3 team members are available and then offers the visitor an array of available time slots.
Problem is, this takes too damn long to get the updated info.
I'm wondering if we could simply get all this data in the background and offer visitors to pick from data that is a few seconds old :)
So my question is, how often can we initiate this without getting banned by Google.
Here you go. The limit you're looking for depends on the type of google account you're using.
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/services/quotas
Also you won't get banned, it just won't run. If you're on a consumer account you could ping it 1x every 18 seconds without it failing. That's as close as you can get to "Live Data".

foursquare api test push works with venue id but not the actual checkin

The test push works, also test push with the venue id.
I'm put as manager for that venue and I have the application that does the push
as an authorized service on my account.
Should this do the trick ?
Actual checkins don't result in any push.
I see there's also connected apps which state you haven't connected any apps yet but I can't seem to connect to my app in any way
Although when going to foursquare.com/app/clientID I see it's connected since the button shows disconnect possibility.
Anyone has a clue on what needs to be changed ? Is it the fact that it's in developer mode ? Cause I'd like to keep it that way...
Cheers,
Jonas
I'm not sure if it helps, but i figured, that if you already checked-in recently (sorry, I cannot provide you with more information about what recently means for foursquare) in the same venue, the push will not get triggered.
Another reason may be the privacy-settings of the user checking-in. I have no proof for that, yet, but not having activated "Include me in the public list of people who are currently checked in at a venue" or "Let venue managers see when I check in to their business, or when I am one of their best customers" might suppress the push as well.
Kind regards, Thomas

Better way to notify the users about workflow items

I want to notify the users about their assignment list/status of their work items via notification.
Instead of sending email notification, is it possible to show the notifications in Tridion itself? Say for example: having new item like "Notifications" under shortcuts-->mytasks?
Or is there any better way to notify the users apart from email communication, because the users dont want to receive so many mails in their mail box.
Yes. The list of items shown shortcuts is extendable, just like every other list I've ever looked at in the Tridion GUI.
Have a look at this blog post from Jaime to get started. The topic of how to extend is was also covered in this question, but Jaime's tutorial is probably a better starting point.
Once you get some experience with writing this extension, you'll probably run into questions similar to the one Nuno asked here (and that was answered expertly by Jaime and Boris).
In general I like to think of workflow notification in two broad groups - Active and Passive. Under active notifications, I really only include email notification, but you could expand the concept to push notifications to an iphone app or send a text message etc. When considering active notifications, it is very common for users to get fed up of having too many alerts from the system, so it is important to design it in a flexible way that allows your users to not feel bombarded with alerts. The most successful implementation I have implemented allowed users to say how often they receive notifications. Typically they set this to every 24 hours, and they receive a summary email of their pending assignments each morning. This allows users who are very active and use their task list regularly to never receive emails, as they normally get to the items before the following day.
Moving to passive forms of notification, if you keep in mind that you can expose a user's task list using the API's the SDL have provided, you could think about implementing the following forms of passive notification:
Create an RSS feed for the Users's assignment list
Create a Widget/Portlet for a company intranet to show a user their assignments
Create some kind of desktop or mobile app which can pull the data
Set the default start screen of the CMS to be the Task List rather than the Dashboard
The last of these options has been an "out of the box" offering from Tridion for a long time (but I think it was dropped by mistake at some point with Tridion 2009 or 2011. However, #Alvin has recently answered one of my other questions, which may help solve this issue (although it may not be supported). Essentially you can set the <defaultpage> node in the CME.config to /Views/Dashboard/Dashboard.aspx#locationId=cme:workitems. This will make the UI automatically open on the work list (BUT I REPEAT... THIS MAY NOT BE SUPPORTED).

ASP.NET Service - Web or Windows?

I'm looking for a method in which an application I will be hosting will have the ability to run a tasks on a giving interval of x minutes to check a database and send out reminder emails automatically. This would of course be based upon a scenario in which someone has scheduled a meeting, let's say, on a day and the service's job would be to send a reminder a week prior to the meeting and on the day of the meeting. Would I be looking to run a Windows Service to complete this function or is there a better way to do such a thing? Not asking for full source just a push in the right direction. Thanks for the guidance in advance!
sounds like a windows service would work good here. Set a timer in the service that will read your database at the given interval and perform the actions you want.
Here's a link that might help you to get started.

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