question

F. Lamaestra asked Feb 20, '16

Daily etymology RSS feed as news flash for Amazon echo

Hello, Please consider making a "daily etymology" news flash item for the Amazon echo, perhaps sourced from this free daily etymology RSS feed. http://feeds.feedburner.com/membean/MembeanWROTD This would be a great skill or newsflash item to have, when someone is not interested in the standard NEWS items currently available in the daily newsflash item. Or you could just make this a skill, similar to the Joke of the Day' Skill.

alexa skills kit

10 |5000

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jjaquinta answered Feb 20, '16

I have a Name Nerd skill (based on namenerd.com) that will be submitted for certification next week. It's not etymology, but it does have a "name of the day" feature.

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F. Lamaestra answered Feb 20, '16

That's very interesting, thank you. Do you know if the source information for this namenerd skill comes from an audio file or is it sourced from a text file as TTS? I liked the etymology source, since it was sourced from a audio file, much like the existing news feed models. It just plays the most recent audio file, simple. Say, does anyone have a generic RSS skill which can pull the latest audio file form an RSS and just play that? That would work for me.

10 |5000

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jjaquinta answered Feb 20, '16

I used Alexa's TTS. I have another kill, Demotivate Me, that (mostly) uses a voice actor. You could write a RSS transcriber. However it would have to transcode whatever the audio input was to the audio supported by Alexa. It's not terribly hard, but it's a bit tedious to do and do right.

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F. Lamaestra answered Feb 20, '16

Oh, I did not know that. The audio format supported by Alexa does not include mp3?

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jjaquinta answered Feb 21, '16

Read the docs. Alexa supports a very specific form of MP3. It must be encoded with a certain bit rate, sample size, a particular type of stereo and be no more than 90 seconds long.

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F. Lamaestra answered Feb 21, '16

Do you know if the newsflash sources currently available (like CNN, NPR, etc) have this 90 second audio limitation?

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jjaquinta answered Feb 21, '16

The newsflash is a feature of the Echo, not of Alexa. Therefore they do not have any limitations. Only Amazon can add Echo features, and they can do whatever they want.

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