Amazon published a statement on its developer blogs, saying that its Alexa AI will soon be getting a notification feature for some of its skills. Amazon launched its voice assistant at the end of 2014, debuting in the Echo home unit, and has already pooled over 12,000 Alexa skills. The skills Alexa can be ‘taught’ resemble regular apps, but with more focused and limited functionalities that it can carry out at your voice command.
The latest announcement comes as a welcome upgrade for many, surely, as it should boost Alexa’s ‘proactivity’ and its ability to deliver information of importance. The notification feature would initially come only in a few skills, such as AccuWeather, The Washington Post, Just Eat and others. Imagine being updated on your pizza delivery status, without the need to ever pause Fifa.
Amazon has explicitly stated that both developers and device manufacturers will have access to development tools, such as Alexa Skills Kit or Alexa voice service, to build and tweak notifications for skills. This should certainly add colour to the Alexa experience, as devs around the world have already been quite ‘artistic’ with their approach to Alexa skills. We are referring to the ridiculous amount of cat skills and ‘yo mama jokes’ skills that would benefit from creative notification ideas…not.
Echo owners would see a pulsing green ring when they have a notification waiting
Users will be alerted of notifications via a chime sound and a light indicator on the device. You could then ask Alexa to tell you what it is, with a simple 'Alexa, what are my notifications?' One would wonder why Alexa doesn’t just read the alert out loud, instead, but we would have to take the query to the guys at Amazon.
Recommended Stories
People, who wish to make use of the new notification feature, would have to enable the functionality through the Alexa app for each skill they want to hear from. Amazon’s blog post does not specify a date for the launch of the feature, but developers can sign up on Amazon’s platform to be notified when it is available to poke at.
A discussion is a place, where people can voice their opinion, no matter if it
is positive, neutral or negative. However, when posting, one must stay true to the topic, and not just share some
random thoughts, which are not directly related to the matter.
Things that are NOT allowed:
Off-topic talk - you must stick to the subject of discussion
Offensive, hate speech - if you want to say something, say it politely
Spam/Advertisements - these posts are deleted
Multiple accounts - one person can have only one account
Impersonations and offensive nicknames - these accounts get banned
Moderation is done by humans. We try to be as objective as possible and moderate with zero bias. If you think a
post should be moderated - please, report it.
Have a question about the rules or why you have been moderated/limited/banned? Please,
contact us.
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed: