Bamboo Children's Learning Skill

Taking a look at this, Alexa has not had enough children's voice learning skills

Bamboo Learning Launches Comprehensive Educational Alexa Skill   By Eric Hal Schwartz in Voicebot.ai

Voice-based educational technology startup Bamboo Learning has debuted a new eponymous Alexa Skill for teaching kids from kindergarten through fifth grade. The new skill combines lessons on reading, language arts, and math, as opposed to the individual, Alexa skills for those subjects already available, with families able to enroll multiple kids in different grades to take part in the lessons.

SOUNDS OF LEARNING

Bamboo Learning already offers Alexa skills and Google Assistant actions on several subjects. The new Bamboo Learning Alexa skill merges the Bamboo Math, Bamboo Books, and Bamboo English skills into a single curriculum containing millions of activities narrated by a Panda teacher. The Panda guides the children through the lessons, noting when they are correct and helping point them in the right direction if they get it wrong.  A family can enroll up to six users to take part in personalized lessons, with each child having their own unique animal avatar, to mark their educational progress. The lessons are designed to be purely audio but include images and text on Echo Show smart displays and Fire TVs. .. ' 

Amazon Knowledge Skills for Business

 In the current Amazon Skills kit, a number of interesting things, including some minimal code things.,which is useful to see.   While the really remarkable knowledge things will need deep coding for now,  how nice to be able to patch in some true insights with little complex code.   Gives more power to non-coders. 

Announcing Alexa Knowledge Skills for Alexa for Business and Personal Devices (Generally Available): Build Q&A Skills In Minutes Using Only Spreadsheets, Without Writing Code

Tom Reno Apr 07, 2021 

Also see the rest of the developers knowledge skills update.  

Alexa Entities Build with Knowledge Graphs

Announcements in the Alexa Development blog about new means to connect knowledge graph data to voice interactions with Entities.    With code and Dev examples.   Technical.

Announcing Alexa Entities (Beta): Create More Intelligent and Engaging Skills With Easy Access to Alexa’s Knowledge  ....

Launch Productivity Build

We are excited to announce Alexa Entities (Beta), a new suite of tools that provides access to information about popular entities including people, places and things from Alexa’s Knowledge Graph. With Alexa Entities, you can now resolve strings in a customer’s utterance to common entities from a built-in catalog, using those entities as an entry point to traverse Alexa’s structured knowledge. Alexa Entities is currently supported for all customers with 15 Built-in Slot Types in English (US) and English (CA). Check out the technical documentation here to start building skills with Alexa’s knowledge.

Alexa Entities provides access to Alexa’s high-quality, continuously updated Knowledge Graph containing facts about popular entities including people (e.g. George Clooney’s birthday), places (e.g. the population and capital of Belgium) and things (e.g. the average weight of a hippo). 

Why Use Alexa Entities

Build More Intelligent & Engaging Skills: Alexa Entities makes Built-in Slot Types more useful by linking entities to Alexa’s knowledge, which can be used to build more engaging and intelligent experiences for customers. Connections between entities can be used to create more natural dialogues, for example “Add Alias Grace to my reading list”, “Got it. Have you thought about reading The Testaments, also written by Margaret Atwood in 2019?” Knowledge can also be used to easily disambiguate between similarly named entities, e.g. “Did you mean Anne Hathaway, born in 1556, or the actress in films such as Les Misérables?” or simply presented on-screen to create more engaging visual experiences. For example, the company Vocala recently used Alexa Entities to improve their new skill “Voice Blast”, which allows customers to compete against other players to guess celebrity voices. Alexa’s knowledge is used to provide additional facts about celebrities on-screen, complementing the spoken response with useful & interesting information. Simply say “Alexa, play Voice Blast” to see Alexa Entities in action.  ... "

Multiple value Slots for Improved Dialog

 Reported in Amazon Developer,  Dialog is the thing.   

Now Available: Use Multi-Value Slots to build more Natural conversations

Karthik Ragubathy Jan 19, 2021

Share:  CLI Dialog Management

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Multi-Value Slots, taking a step toward enabling Alexa Skills to understand more complex commands and utterances. As skill developers, you spend a lot of time developing interactions to be more natural and conversational so your customers can have a memorable experience with your skill. One thing that makes conversations more natural is the ability to speak out multiple values of the same type in a single sentence, similar to what we do in our daily conversations. For example, my partner and I could be discussing dinner plans, and I would say, “What can we cook with potatoes and broccoli for dinner?” If you want your customers to be able to have similar conversations with your Alexa skill, you can use Multi-Value Slots in your skill.

Without Multi-Value Slots, here’s how you might have implemented that conversation within your skill.

Customer : Alexa, open recipe suggestions.

Alexa : Welcome to recipe suggestions. Tell me the first ingredient you have today?

Customer : I have potatoes.

Alexa : Got it. what’s the second ingredient you want today?

Customer : Some broccoli

Alexa : Got it. Based on the ingredients you have, Italian Potatoes and Broccoli sounds like a good idea. ...'

Alexa and HIPAA

 Skill directions in healthcare.  Requirements are interesting.

Amazon Opens Applications for HIPAA-Eligible Alexa Skills
 Eric Hal Schwartz on September 11, 2020 at 1:00 pm

Amazon is expanding its HIPAA-compliant Alexa skill program, a year after it first debuted. Any interested voice app developer may now apply for the special certification proving the skill complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and with Amazon’s standards for those skills. As applying voice technology to healthcare becomes more popular, offering a guide toward HIPAA compliance could help position Amazon as a leader in the space.

HIPAA Alexa
Amazon unveiled its HIPAA-compliance program over a year ago. Six voice apps and the Alexa platform were certified by the government as safe to collect and distribute Protected Health Information (PHI) appropriately. Talkspace, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the others were all invited to participate in the program, and until now, it has remained an invite-only program. At the time, Amazon painted the limits as necessary to test and improve how the program would operate, including the release of an Alexa Skills Kit specifically for healthcare. T Developers must explain why they want the certification, how they will get people to find and use it, and how it will offer a “compelling experience” for users. Just technically complying with all of the guidelines is not enough, and Amazon has made it clear that not every application will be approved, regardless of a developer’s technical ability.  ... " 

Your Brand can Have a Voice

Way back experimented with the Mr Clean Brand using talk, voice and chat..   But the tech was not there to deliver voice and value.   Much closer now.   Will it work effectively to engage, sell?

Give Your Brand A Voice With Alexa

Voice interfaces have changed how people interact with technology and services. Customers use Alexa billions of times each week through hundreds of millions of Alexa devices, whether that be in living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, cars, or on the go. They use voice in place of mobile devices, and in situations where they used no device previously.

We spoke with Australian and New Zealand brands to share their experience about building for voice. They’re reaching and delighting customers through Alexa devices, and helping to redefine the way their customers interact with their brands.

Hear how brands like Coca-Cola Australia explore the role of voice in the path to purchase, Australia's leading energy company AGL have seen “incredible” Net Promoter Scores from customers using the AGL Skill, and FOX SPORTS reached new fans with their sports news skills. Learn how Nova Entertainment is using Alexa to change the way people listen to radio, and how Australia’s #1 food site, Taste.com.au is using voice to transform the kitchen with their recipe skill. ... " 

CNet Looks at Alexa Event

I attended, good overall.  Here a general overview.

Amazon's Alexa event shows the future of the Echo's voice assistant
Amazon hasn't revealed any major new Alexa-powered hardware this year, but today's Alexa Live developer conference gives insights into its voice-centric priorities moving forward.

By David Priest 

Last year's fully remote Alexa Live developer conference was good practice for this year, Daniel Rausch, Amazon's vice president of smart home, joked with me on the phone -- even though no one knew they were practicing at the time. It's late July in a year racked by pandemic, and although Amazon has not released a single major piece of smart home hardware, Rausch is excited.

"It's by far the largest set of developer-facing announcements about new features and new tools that we've ever [released] at once," said Rausch -- some of which he believes "represent a revolution" for a voice assistant now over five years old. So what exactly are these new features, and how are they going to impact you? Let's dive in.  .... "

Alexa-Live Sessions

Attended this, mostly either broadly general or deep technical.  Dev and Device oriented.  Like the direction, lots to do  The on-demand pieces are at the link below, go to the bottom of the page at the link to register and see/hear the sessions:

Discover the Latest in Voice Technology
During Alexa Live, our virtual developer event, we brought together the developer and device maker community to explore the latest advancements in voice technology and Alexa development tools. Whether you build Alexa skills, make Alexa devices, or lead a business that’s incorporating voice, Alexa Live offered content and resources to help you build delightful customer experiences. View the on-demand sessions and resources to catch up on the news and technical deep-dives we shared at Alexa Live 2020. .... ' 

Amazon Alexa-Live Next Week

Am an invited remote participant at the Amazon Skill Developer event:  Alexa-Live on July 22 next week.  In particular to represent a project with voice assistant application potential.    See more about this event.    If you have anything you would like me to be on the lookout for at this meeting, send me a note.    I will likely post some items of general interest here, especially about novel applications, or ones that indicate changes in direction.

Alexa Agency Curriculum

Still have not seen what I call voice-first strategies in many places.  Like businesses.   They are still matters of convenience, accessibility or cases where hands-free can be important. 

Introducing the Alexa Agency Curriculum  from Amazon.

More and more, customers are making Alexa part of their daily routines. And while building a voice-first strategy has multiple considerations, it’s also crucial for modern-day brands and their agencies. That’s why we’re excited to introduce the Alexa Agency Curriculum, a set of Alexa skill-building resources specially designed for agencies, brands working with agencies, studios, and tool providers. You can incorporate this curriculum into your voice practice and with your strategy, planning, and development expertise, help determine the optimal touch points across your client’s customer journey. Thank you for your continued strategic and creative approach for driving innovation and creating delightful customer experiences with Alexa.  ... " 

Get Started with the Alexa Skills Kit

Another introduction to how skills work in Alexa.

Get Started with the Alexa Skills Kit

Learn how Alexa skills work and how you can build one using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK). Check out the different types of skills you can build, and explore the self-service APIs and tools that make it easy to get started. Get inspired by the delightful experiences others have built, then start bringing your own vision to life.  ... 

How an Alexa Skill Works    |    Explore ASK Features    |    Next Steps    |    Get Inspired

How an Alexa Skill Works
An Alexa skill has both an interaction model—or voice user interface—and application logic. When a customer speaks, Alexa processes the speech in the context of your interaction model to determine the customer request. Alexa then sends the request to your skill application logic, which acts on it. You provide your application logic as a back-end cloud service hosted by Alexa, AWS, or another server.   ... "

Amazon Streamlines Building Smart Home Alexa Skills

Nice idea, have often found myself groping for some skill name.  Should have been done sooner.

Amazon Streamlines Building Smart Home Alexa Skills
 by Eric Hal Schwartz in Voicebot.ai

Alexa developers can now combine their apps with smart home devices. Amazon had been piloting the Multi-Capability Skills feature for some time, but the option is now generally available to developers.

MERGING VOICES
Until now, an Alexa developer would need one app to handle smart home capabilities of a device, and another with a different name for features that Alexa’s smart home API didn’t support. With Multi-Capability Skills, both sides are combined into a single voice app, handling both custom skills and the smart home skills built into Alexa. It basically makes an Alexa skill flexible enough to handle custom commands within the existing framework of the voice app. Most smart home devices have an on and off switch, for instance, but a command to change lighting colors is only useful for the relevant devices. With the new feature, both aspects can be included under one Alexa skill.

“With MCS, customers no longer need to search for or enable multiple skills to access all the features of their Alexa-connected device,” Amazon explained in its announcement. “MCS removes the friction of customers needing to remember different skill names, allowing customers to access all the expanded smart home features with a single invocation name. For example, by building a multi-capability skill, Dyson enabled its customers to interact more naturally with their Alexa-connected devices. Customers can control their Dyson fans with commands like “Alexa, set the fan speed to 5,” or “Alexa, set Oscillation to wide,” and set night modes and quiet modes in their daily routines, all features previously not available in a single skill experience.” .... '

New in Alexa Skills

Understanding and leveraging the confidence of what you are hearing and presenting for a 'Skill' is important.  As in human conversation it is often not perfect.   Technical for skill developers.

Use the Intent Confidence Dashboard to Improve Skill Accuracy
Omkar Phatak, Amazon

Build Tips & Tools Developer Console Analyze Voice User Interface News

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of intent confidence as part of ASK analytics dashboard. Intent confidence indicates your interaction model’s performance by mapping customer utterances to intents with high, medium and low confidence. In aggregate you can see how your skill is performing against how customers are using it. This blog covers a few methods you can use to improve the overall intent confidence of your skill if it is not performing to your expectations. You can view the intent confidence metric under the analytics tab of the developer console.  ... "

Alexa Knowledge Skills Advance to Existing Templates

Note the capabilities for security in the enterprise, as well as editing and reuse of existing knowledge.  Ultimately if this is done well, it can greatly advance business oriented systems.  Managing the underlying data will still be a challenge.   In the past we built FAQ based systems.  More detail below:

Amazon’s Alexa Knowledge Skills enables voice-guided FAQs, glossaries, and more     By Kyle Wiggers in Venturebeat.

In yet another step toward the enterprise side of the burgeoning conversational intelligence segment, Amazon today launched Alexa Knowledge Skills, a new skill type for its Alexa platform that allows employees and customers to ask questions about an organization’s data without invoking a skill name. It’s available in preview starting today, ahead of general availability in the months to come.

As Alexa senior product marketing manager Ben Grossman explains in a blog post, Alexa Knowledge skills enable folks to ask Alexa about different types of data, including (but not limited to) organization charts, building information, events, FAQs, glossaries, product catalogs, and more. Developing a Knowledge skill requires a spreadsheet of data but no extensive coding or cloud infrastructure, and the skills are privately distributed through Amazon’s Alexa for Business or Alexa for Hospitality services, meaning that they remain accessible only on devices within an organization. ... " 

New Alexa Emotions

New complexity in voice expression is announced for Alexa.  Need to see this in useful context, but intrigued by possibilities.

Use New Alexa Emotions and Speaking Styles to Create a More Natural and Intuitive Voice Experience      By Catherine Gao

We’re excited to introduce two new Alexa capabilities that will help create a more natural and intuitive voice experience for your customers. Starting today, you can enable Alexa to respond with either a happy/excited or a disappointed/empathetic tone in the US. Emotional responses are particularly relevant to skills in the gaming and sports categories. Additionally, you can have Alexa respond in a speaking style that is more suited for a specific type of content, starting with news and music. Speaking styles are curated text-to-speech voices designed to create a more delightful customer experience for specific content. For example, the news speaking style makes Alexa’s voice sound similar to what you hear from TV news anchors and radio hosts. To learn more, check out our technical documentation for emotions here and speaking styles here.

How Alexa Emotions Work
Alexa emotions use Neural TTS (NTTS) technology, Amazon’s text-to-speech technology that enables more natural sounding speech. For example, you can have Alexa respond in a happy/excited tone when a customer answers a trivia question correctly or wins a game. Similarly, you can have Alexa respond in a disappointed/empathetic tone when a customer asks for the sports score and their favorite team has lost. Early customer feedback indicates that overall satisfaction with the voice experience increased by 30% when Alexa responded with emotions. Check out the following examples and compare them to the neutral tone:  .... ' 

Personalizing Voice Skills

Now personalization is generally available, a small but useful aspect of voice interaction.

Personalize Your Alexa Experience with Voice Profiles (Generally Available)

By Mohit Mittal

We are excited to announce that the Alexa skill personalization capability is now generally available for the Alexa Skills Kit in all locales. Alexa developers can leverage voice profiles in custom skills, enabling their skill to respond based on the voice interacting with their skill. Customers create voice profiles through the Alexa companion app, and the skill then uses these profiles to reference who is talking. Now, you can create a personalized experience for different customers, so your skill can address preferences, remember settings, and differentiate between household members. Skills already utilizing this feature to deliver delightful, customized experiences to customers include Uber, Vodafone, 7-Minute Workout, and others.

Customize Your Skill Experience Based on Who Is Speaking

Now, your skill can determine who is speaking when customers engage naturally with your skill, no longer needing to switch between Alexa accounts to access individual preferences. Personalizing your skill experience can range from a friendly greeting to responses based on a customer’s likes, dislikes, interests, or account history. Use SSML and the alexa:name tag for Alexa to insert the user's name into a response, and then add a prompt with context, such as “Hi Jeff, welcome back. Would you like to order another ride to the airport?” If the customer changes the name in their profile through the Alexa app, it automatically changes in the greeting as well. ... " 

New Tools Annonced for Alexa NLU Dev

Impressed by the number of new capabilities being rolled out for skills delivery in Alexa.  Yet I still see quite a few foundational problems with natural language understanding on Alexa, which I use at the skill and foundation level every day.   Makes for a shaky impression during demonstrations.  Does this mean they have hit some fundamental limitation of technology for now?

Build, Test, and Tune Your Skills with Three New Tools  (Full detail at link) 
October 09, 2019
By Leo Ohannesian

We’re excited to announce the General Availability of two tools which focus on your voice model’s accuracy: Natural Language Understanding (NLU) Evaluation Tool and Utterance Conflict Detection. We are also excited to announce that you will now be able to build your own quality and usage reporting with the Get Metrics API, now in Beta. These tools help complete the suite of Alexa skill testing and analytics tools that aide in creating and validating your voice model prior to publishing your skill, detect possible issues when your skill is live, and help you refine your skill over time.

The NLU Evaluation Tool helps you batch test utterances and compare how they are interpreted by your skill’s NLU model against your expectations. The tool has three use cases:

Prevent overtraining NLU models: overtraining your NLU model with too many sample utterances and slot values can reduce accuracy. Instead of adding exhaustive sample utterances to your interaction model, you can now run NLU Evaluations with utterances you expect users to say. If any utterance resolves to the wrong intent and/or slot, you can improve accuracy of your skill’s NLU model by only adding those utterances as new training data (by creating new sample utterances and/or slots).

Regression tests - you can create regression tests and run them after adding new features to your skills to ensure your customer experience stays intact.

Accuracy measurements - you can measure the accuracy of your skill’s NLU model by running an NLU Evaluation with anonymized frequent live utterances surfaced in Intent History (production data), and then measure the impact on accuracy for any changes you make to their NLU model.

Utterance Conflict Detection helps you detect utterances which are accidentally mapped to multiple intents, which reduces accuracy of your Alexa skill’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model. This tool is automatically run on each model build and can be used prior to publishing the first version of your skill or as you add intents and slots over time - preventing you from building models with unintended conflicts.  ..... "

Alexa Course for In-Skill Purchasing

Amazon is crowd sourcing Alexa skills for its infrastructure.   Have worked my way through several training outlines like the below.  Which show the direction they are moving, worth a look.    Still not what I would call very serious AI,  would like it to include skill capabilities that are more remarkable and smart.   Including the exchange of payment also complicates the design and regulation.

New Alexa Skills Training Course: How to Design for In-Skill Purchasing  Justin Jeffress

We’re excited to introduce our new Alexa Skills course, How to Design for In-Skill Purchasing. This free course outlines the best practices for designing a great monetized Alexa skill experience.

Optimize Your Voice Experience for In-Skill Purchasing

In order to effectively monetize your Alexa skills, you need to design an experience that inspires your customers to continue using your skill over and over. While a portion of the experience depends on the technical implementation (code, information architecture, APIs, etc.) it can only go as far as your voice interaction design. So we created a design-focused course to help you design a skill with in-skill purchasing. You’ll learn what makes great premium content, when to make offers, how to write offers, how to handle transitions to and from the Amazon Purchase flow, and how to provide access to purchases.

By completing this course, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to design and optimize your skill for in-skill purchasing.

Course Components:

Introducing Our Use Case
Offer the Right Premium Content
Make an Offer at the Right Time
Write Effective Upsells
Make a Smooth Handoff
Provide Access to Purchases
Wrapping Up & Resources  ... '

Alexa Presentation Language Released

Has been around now for a year,  worth looking at as to how capabilities that link voice, text and animation can be constructed.  Still need more ways to sweeten the actual intelligence provided.  Worth an examination as to the approach Amazon is using.

Alexa Presentation Language Now Generally Available: Build Multimodal Experiences that Come Alive with Animation
Arunjeet Singh

Today we are excited to announce that Alexa Presentation Language (APL) is generally available. APL enables you to easily create visually rich Alexa skills for devices with screens and to adapt them for different device types such as the Echo Show, Echo Spot, Fire TV, LG TVs, and the Lenovo Smart Tab. Adding visuals and touch can enhance voice experiences and make skills more engaging and interactive for customers. With the general availability of APL, we addressed key known issues you raised to enable specific use cases and addressed feedback from the public beta.

We believe that the emergence of voice user interfaces isn’t an incremental improvement to existing technology; it marks a significant shift in human-computer interaction. That’s why APL is designed from the ground up for creating voice-first, multimodal Alexa skills.

Over the past year, we have launched many different tools and resources to help you build skills that include text, graphics, slideshows, animation, and video content. There are thousands of multimodal skills across different categories. For example, the winner of the Alexa Multimodal Challenge, Stuart Pocklington, created Loop It, a skill that lets you choose from a variety of audio loops to create your own track. The skill makes use of TouchWrappers to allow users to navigate by touching the screen. Customers can see images for the sun, clouds, and other conditions when interacting with Big Sky, a skill that uses APL’s ability to adapt content to adjust layout and information density based on the device display size.

As APL approaches its 1st birthday, we want to highlight some important benefits, tools and features you should be aware of so that you can build rich, interactive skills. .... "

Alexa Skills for Productivity

Still, I think not good enough to really make me have a standard device on my desk at work.   What can be done to really make it essential?

Review: 18 Alexa skills for productivity, collaboration and more in Computerworld

You can use Amazon’s voice-activated Alexa assistant to send Slack messages, texts, and emails; add items to to-do lists; and more. But do Alexa skills for business users really save you time and effort?
         
 By James A. Martin

Earlier this year, Amazon announced it had sold more than 100 million Alexa devices. Along with the consumer market, Amazon is also pushing Alexa into offices via Alexa for Business, which enables developers to create skills exclusively for internal users at their companies via APIs and other tools.

But can Alexa’s off-the-shelf skills truly make enterprise users more productive? Will they make collaboration easier? To find out, I tested 18 Alexa productivity and collaboration skills that are available to everyone but potentially useful for business professionals. All of these skills are free, although some are associated with paid or freemium services, as noted.  .... "