question

Seems to me it depends on the conditions of the site providing the data. If they allow free, non-attributed use of their content then you are probably OK. But I'm guessing this is somewhat rare. Even free use of data usually requires attribution and that could be difficult unless you provided attribution via a card delivered to the Echo App. Also - if you figure out how to play bird calls (or any sounds) via Alexa, please let the community know! :)

G Crawford - first of all, thanks for pointing me in the direction of AWS Lambda - it rocks! SO much easier than the whole VPS/SSL/node setup. Regarding playing sounds, the bird calls idea is just a hypothetical I came up with off the top of my head, but since the Echo is a speaker that already plays music and Audiobook audio on demand I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible to play other supported audio files on demand. I can't say I've looked into it myself, but Javascript has a playSound event that's easy to launch with an onClick event or onMouseover event, so it seems logical the same would be possible with an onIntent event.

I was being a bit facetious with my comment about the bird sounds. At the moment it seems that Alexa can only be used for "text to speech" by our 3rd party apps and at the moment streaming of audio is not possible. However, it clearly is possible to have the Echo play an audio stream since the native functionality of Alexa does it all the time. Hopefully at some point in the (near!) future this option will be opened to all and the sooner the better :)

Hi April, Keep in mind that all the Alexa AppKit Javascript will be running on the remote server side, not the user/client side. Therefore, anything that's not valid JSON back to the service will simply be ignored, so methods like playSound won't do anything. Thanks, Nick

Thanks Nick G, but the sound thing was just an off-the-top-of-the-head example. My main question pertains to rights, and whether rights must be cleared if your app hooks into an outside site/service that's owned by someone else (e.g., 'word of the day' app hooking into dictionary.com).

I actually had the same question, I've been meaning to ask. Suppose I build a trivia app or a jokes app for specific types of jokes/humor. Assume, I develop without an API, initially. I just hard code what Alexa should say. Let's just use one example, I like humor based on "things actually said in court." Do I need to have Alexa vocalize the source of the content ( "From example.com I found this..." ) or is it ok to simply cite the source on the Alexa App card? That seems to be what I am hearing but I want to be sure.

For the jokes app, I could just have Alexa say, "I found this on Book Name" with further details on the card in the Alexa app. Would that be necessary? My trivia app would rely on multiple sources, so the UX would be less than desirable to have Alexa vocalize each and every website, book or other source.

Thanks,

Bruce