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Amazon Opens Up the Software For Alexa-Controlled Smart Homes (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader cites an article on CNET: Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa has already grown into a viable platform for voice-activated smart home control. Now, Amazon is introducing new, open software that will make it easier for smart home gadgets to hop aboard that platform. The software is a new addition to the Alexa Skills Kit called the Smart Home Skill API. The API makes it faster and easier for device makers to build the Skills that sync their products up with Alexa, and it standardizes the vocabulary that they'll use, too. If I make a smart thermostat and sync it up with Alexa using the Smart Home Skill API, I'll be using common terminology that Alexa already knows. That means that Alexa will be able to control my thermostat with basic commands like, "Turn the heat up" or, "Set the thermostat to 70" without me needing to program any of it.
How will they kill it to force you to buy a replacement if they open it up?
. . . .or did the Nest/Revolv issue speed up the announcement and release of this ??
The more "public" you make the interface, the more surface area you expose. I'll keep my mercury-powered, dial-type thermostat, thanks.
Set the thermostat to 70 = 700
Fool me once....
Not interested and glad others are seeing how much control they lose to get the new shiny.
"... Opens Up the Software ..."
..."
"... introducing new, open software
Did anyone else get their hopes up for a split second, until they realized that was very unlikely to be true and read the rest of it?
(I do realize that the description is just a quote from TFA.)
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
This really reminds me of Apple Events back when they were first introduced in the System 7 release... As best it could at the time, the community was attempting (led by Apple) to adopt a common vocabulary for domain specific nouns and verbs, so that all word processors would understand the terms "sentence" and "paragraph" for example. Or "font size".
Ideally, you'd be able to issue something like this below for *any* WP, even if it wasn't fully Recordable yet:
tell application MyWordProcessor
set the font size of the first word of the second sentence of the third paragraph to 12
end
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
There's no way I'm ever getting a system like Echo unless I can set the "wake" word to whatever I like.
Yawn! Going to sleep now, wake me when I can choose my wake word...
Kid, if you want someone to pay attention to you, just call your mom.
I realize that this is "The Cloud" and all; but does releasing an SDK that makes it easier to build applications that depend on your proprietary cloud service really count as "opening" it?
They are obviously under no obligation to open anything, whether fully or partially; and this will presumably make their stuff more useful; it just seems really weird to use "open" to describe what is basically the same thing that platform vendors have always done to encourage people to write stuff that runs on their platform or works with it. A publicly visible platform or API is different than an internal-only one; but if this is 'amazon opens up Alexa', then the fact that you can write win32 applications would be 'Microsoft opens up Windows'.
Really the Echo is really cool hardware but the current API is just too limiting.
How about an Echo intercom system? How about using it as a Sonos?
I really like my Echo but I know it could do a lot more.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.