Two Voice Devs

Not every technology we deal with in Voice is a #VoiceFirst technology, sometimes we need some "adjacent" skill. This week, Mark discusses some recent issues he had involving the validation signature that Alexa provides to skills that run outside AWS Lambda, and Allen provides his perspectives about how these same issues were addressed using Google's Dialogflow.

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Allen may be well known for coordinating his wardrobe with his Google Glass, but he's also as passionate about Glass as he is about Voice. With recent announcements coming from Google about Enterprise Glass v2, Mark asks Allen about what developers should be expecting for Glass' future. And where, exactly, does voice fit into that anyway?

More about Glass:

Now that Mark and Allen have returned from #VOICE22, they take a look at what the summit was like a share a bit about their presentations. Allen talks about outents and how tools like Dialogflow and Multivocal assist with this concept, while Mark talked about developing a #VoiceFirst prescription system for Alexa.

What does it feel like to talk with a spreadsheet? That's the core question behind Vodo Drive (pronounced like "to-do"), one of Allen's big projects for the Google Assistant. After a demo, Allen and Mark discuss how Vodo Drive works, what it teaches us about building large #VoiceFirst software projects, and what the future holds as Vodo Drive needs to move to Amazon Alexa.

Learn more about Vodo Drive at VodoDrive.com

How do you learn new skills in the #VoiceFirst arena? How do you share what you've learned with others? A week before the Voice Summit, Mark and Allen share their experiences as authors, documenters, podcasters, and public speakers.

No matter if you're building an app for the iPhone or Android, a Google Action, or an Amazon Alexa Skill, there are guidelines that you need to follow to make sure your app is approved by the review team. Mark and Allen go over morerules that you should read before you start to develop your #VoiceFirst skill.

Check out the guidelines for Alexa: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/custom-skills/policy-testing-for-an-alexa-skill.html

No matter if you're building an app for the iPhone or Android, a Google Action, or an Amazon Alexa Skill, there are guidelines that you need to follow to make sure your app is approved by the review team. Mark and Allen go over some of the rules that you should read before you start to develop your #VoiceFirst skill.

Check out the guidelines for Alexa: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/custom-skills/policy-testing-for-an-alexa-skill.html

If you're building your own #VoiceFirst app outside the assistants, you'll also need to think about how you get input from people. Fortunately, there are a number of tools available from AWS and Google Cloud (and others) that will help you do this. Mark and Allen go over the raw technologies involved in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding / Processing (NLU / NLP), how they work (broadly speaking), and some thoughts on what needs to be done for the future.

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Not every assistant needs to be part of Amazon Alexa or the Google Assistant. What if you're developing your own voice assistant? How do you take care of some tasks like getting output to your users? In this episode, Allen and Mark give an overview of some of the technologies available to you to send audio exactly the way you want it to sound and some of the tools that are available to use.

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Mark's been on a roll recently, converting many of the utilities he's built as part of writing Amazon Alexa Skills and Google Assistant Actions into open source plugins for Jovo. This week, Mark and Allen discuss why these kinds of libraries are important, review Mark's latest plugin to generate random player names, and uses this as an example for how to build a plugin for Jovo.