Two Voice Devs

Making sure our #VoiceFirst applications are written securely and use secure components is important. And when one of those components has a security bug, it is important that we update it as soon as we can. Mark highlights a recent security vulnerability in the node-forge module, which is used by the alexa-verifier-middleware module. Mark and Allen then discuss what the verifier does and how we can be careful when it comes to using libraries.

Some references:

Allen and Mark chat about the Amazon Alexa Skills Challenge: Aging & Engaging event that is currently in progress that offers cash prizes to developers for creating #VoiceFirst skills that are targeted to the over 55 crowd. Mark is a judge, so has to be a little reserved in what he says, but there's lots of discussion about tools that teams can use to participate and tips for creating skills that have a chance of winning (and are good quality skills!).

Learn more: https://alexaskillsaging.devpost.com/

Guest Host Craig Walls joins Allen to discuss his latest book on #VoiceFirst development for Amazon Alexa, Build Talking Apps for Alexa, as well as what went into his skill to help Disney Theme Park explorers - Mouse Guests.

Mark goes over the latest open source package that he's developed with his company, RAIN, for the #VoiceFirst community. This allows developers to build a CMS system using Sanity that provides content through Jovo. Allen and Mark discuss why these sorts of systems are important, how they improve Voice-based systems, and some future improvements to improve performance.

Links:

Last week, Amazon Alexa ran their annual developer event, Alexa Live, where they showcased a number of new #VoiceFirst features for Alexa. Mark and Allen take a look at the list of announcements for Skill developers and give some first thoughts on what they mean. 

Links:

It's our Second Anniversary show! In addition to a few kind words from our friends, Mark and Allen celebrate by sharing what goes on behind the scenes when creating an episode. How do we come up with #VoiceFirst topics? What is our recording setup like? How do we make transcriptions? Why does Allen always wear a blue shirt? How do you get an episode out every week?

Thank you, everyone, for your questions and your support as we enter our third year!

Mentioned:

Open Source components can be incredibly useful when building your #VoiceFirst Skill or app. Allen asks Mark about his latest Open Source project, Badgerific, which is aimed at rewarding users tokens or badges under certain, specific, conditions.

Badgerific: https://github.com/rmtuckerphx/badgerific

Based on a question from StackOverflow, Allen and Mark explore the question about how to handle a #VoiceFirst scenario where the user needs to provide a list of several items one at a time (a food order, for example). If we're expecting the user to fill in a slot multiple times, or trigger an intent multiple times, before saying they're ready to move on - how do we make sure this intent gets handled over and over? Mark offers ways to handle this using Jovo and the Alexa Skills Kit, while Allen explores doing this with Dialogflow ES and CX, and ponders if Alexa Conversations will help.

With Mark and Allen's plans to explore some new tools and features for #VoiceFirst developers, we discuss what we've been playing with for the past week. Mark talks about the Dialog Management API in VoiceFlow and how it can be used by Amazon Alexa developers as a way to easily design and deploy skills, while Allen takes his first steps into re-learning Android development for App Actions.

More information:

On the occasion of our 100th episode, and with big changes in the #VoiceFirst industry from Google and beyond, Mark and Allen take a moment to look back on where voice has been, and what new developer tools and platforms we'll be looking at for the next 100 episodes.