Private telecom players like Airtel and Vodafone-Idea have joined hands with OTT players to offer free content to their users. For example, Airtel and Vodafone-Idea are offering Amazon Prime subscription and access to ZEE5. Similarly, the state-run telecom operator

Airtel has recently partnered with Amazon, where it is offering free membership for Amazon Prime with its postpaid plans. The telco used to offer a free subscription of Netflix, but now, the telco is offering only Amazon Prime, ZEE5, and Airtel

We have seen many new cameras and accessories launched in the Indian market recently. A few of them have been listed below. From the list, you can have the Canon EOS 1500D which sports an APS-C CMOS 24.1 MP sensor. It

During the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and nationwide lockdown, there is an increase in video content streaming and gaming, especially mobile gaming. At this point in time, Amazon India has taken efforts to cater to the gamers. In one such move, Amazon

Similar to AmazonBasics, Flipkart unveiled its very own SmartBuy store today. The key goal of the initiative is said to increase the sales that had dropped down considerably due to demonetization. Considering the increasing cash crunch, e-commerce websites have

During the COVID-19 lockdown in India, Amazon has come up with a new credit service for its users. Well, the latest service dubbed Amazon Pay Later is a rebranded Amazon Pay EMI service that is available for its users in the

After KGF Chapter 1 emerged the most-viewed Indian movie of 2019 on Amazon Prime Video, the OTT giant is now in talks with the makers for the rights of its second installment. According to a few media reports, Amazon Prime has

Local NGOs are working hard to plant seedlings over thousands of square miles of deforested land in Brazil.

Vicente Piratapuia, 69, of the Piratapuia tribe had a high fever and could hardly breathe, but he refused to leave his home on the outskirts of the Amazon rainforest's biggest city.

With the digital revolution in India came the e-commerce sector, completely transforming the way consumers purchase items across all segments. This sector saw its fair share of ups and downs in the past decade.

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019.

[S.l.] : APRESS, 2020.

Automatically post to Twitter when an Amazon RSS feed is updated.

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Creative still counts
When we think of Amazon, we tend to think about deals and shipping. Everyone from your neighbor to your grandparents knows that Amazon probably has the best price on anything you could want to buy, and they know that the companys bread and butter is shipping it to you as quickly as possible. In other words, nearly every consumer out there knows what Amazon is about.

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A report yesterday revealed that Amazon might open up its Alexa ecosystem to allow push notifications, so that it could interrupt to warn you about a traffic jam, for instance.

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Amazon is now letting anyone create and publish Alexa skills into the Alexa skills store. Amazon first made it easy to create custom skills last year with its Alexa Skill Blueprints program, and it’s taking those custom responses and allowing them to be published in the store for everyone to download and use. There are currently more than 80,000 existing Alexa skills in the store, but todays announcement means the store will be growing significantly with user-generated custom skills.

Amazon is primarily aiming this new functionality at content creators, businesses, brands, and other organizations. Publications, local sports teams, YouTubers, and others will all be able to broadcast their latest updates by simply adding a recorded audio feed URL to a blueprint skill directly and then publishing it on the store.

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A locally funded Puerto Rican parrot (Amazona vittata) genome sequencing project increases avian data and advances young researcher education Oleksyk, Taras K.; Pombert, Jean-Francois; Siu, Daniel; Mazo-Vargas, Anyimilehidi; Ramos, Brian; Guiblet, Wilfried; Afanador, Yashira; Ruiz-Rodriguez, Christina T.; Nickerson, Michael L.; Logue, David M.; Dean, Michael; Figueroa, Luis; Valentin, Ricardo; Martinez-Cruzado, Juan-Carlos Background: Amazona vittata is a critically endangered Puerto Rican endemic bird, the only surviving native parrot species in the United States territory, and the first parrot in the large Neotropical genus Amazona, to be studied on a genomic scale. Findings: In a unique community-based funded project, DNA from an A. vittata female was sequenced using a HiSeq Illumina platform, resulting in a total of ~42.5 billion nucleotide bases. This provided approximately 26.89x average coverage depth at the completion of this funding phase. Filtering followed by assembly resulted in 259,423 contigs (N50=6,983 bp, longest=75,003 bp), which was further scaffolded into 148,255 fragments (N50=19,470, longest=206,462 bp). This provided ~76% coverage of the genome based on an estimated size of 1.58 Gb. The assembled scaffolds allowed basic genomic annotation and comparative analyses with other available avian whole-genome sequences. Conclusions: The current data represents the first genomic information from and work carried out with a unique source of funding. This analysis further provides a means for directed training of young researchers in genetic and bioinformatics analyses and will facilitate progress towards a full assembly and annotation of the Puerto Rican parrot genome. It also adds extensive genomic data to a new branch of the avian tree, making it useful for comparative analyses with other avian species. Ultimately, the knowledge acquired from these data will contribute to an improved understanding of the overall population health of this species and aid in ongoing and future conservation efforts. Sherpa Romeo green journal. Open access article. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 (CC BY 2.0) applies

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Speaking at the WIRED Business Conference, Amazon SVP of Devices, David Limp confessed that if Amazon is to continue to thrive in the future, it has to consider itself an AI company.

Instead of just yelling at you, Amazon's Alexa now can show you things with a new flashy screen. Here's WIRED's review of the Amazon Echo Show.

WIRED Editor in Chief Nicholas Thompson discusses the regulation of tech companies and their products with European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spoke with WIRED’s Steven Levy as part of WIRED25, WIRED’s 25th anniversary celebration in San Francisco.

An Amazon worker at a warehouse in New York where employees called for greater coronavirus safety measures has died of Covid-19. Amazon has become a lifeline for consumers facing lockdowns and restrictions around the world, and the company is in the process of adding some 175,000 new employees to cope with the surging demand.

Hayden Library - PM5023.A43 2014

Under the initiative, Amazon will deliver orders to a designated delivery point in the vicinity of the containment zone, from where volunteers will further deliver the packages to customers' doorstep, the company said in a statement.

Viola, Eduardo J., author

Duchesne Winter, Juan R

Lizzie Wade discusses whether the amazing biodiversity of the Amazon Basin was the result of massive flooding, or the uplift of the Andes mountain range. David Grimm talks about microbes aboard the International Space Station, the fate of juvenile giant ground sloths during the Pleistocene, and singing classes as social glue. Hosted by Susanne Bard. [Img: ©Jason Houston]

This week, we chat about the science behind breaking the 2-hour marathon barrier, storing data in DNA strands, and a dinosaur’s zigzagging backbones with Online News Editor Catherine Matacic. And Carolina Levis joins Alexa Billow to discuss evidence that humans have been domesticating the Amazon’s plants a lot longer than previously thought.   Read Carolina Levis’s research in Science.     Listen to previous podcasts.   [Image: Carolina Levis; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Wittig, Michael, 1987- author

Internationally, the pandemic has hit Amazon the hardest in India, where the company has had to forgo sales to comply with the government restricting delivery to essential goods such as groceries

JSJ 274 Amazon Voice Services and Echo Skills with Terrance Smith

On today’s episode of JavaScript Jabber, we have panelists Joe Eames, Aimee Knight, Charles Max Wood, and we have special guest Terrance Smith. He’s here today to talk about the Amazon Alexa platform. So tune in and learn more about Amazon Voice Services!

[01:00] – Introduction to Terrance Smith

Terrance is from Hacker Ferrer Software. They hack love into software.

[01:30] – Amazon Voice Service

What I’m working on is called My CareTaker named probably pending change. What it will do and what it is doing will be to help you be there as a caretaker’s aid for the person in your life. If you have to take care an older parent, My CareTaker will be there in your place if you have to work that day. It will be your liaison to that person. Your mom and dad can talk to My CareTaker and My CareTaker could signal you via SMS or email message or tweet, anything on your usage dashboard, and you would be able to respond. It’s there when you’re not.

[04:35] – Capabilities

Getting started with it, there are different layers. The first layer is the Skills Kit for generally getting into the Amazon IoT. It has a limited subset of the functionality. You can give commands. The device parses them, sends them to Amazon’s endpoint, Amazon sends a call back to your API endpoint, and you can do whatever you want. That is the first level. You can make it do things like turn on your light switch, start your car, change your thermostat, or make an API call to some website somewhere to do anything.

[05:50] – Skills Kit

Skills Kit is different with AVS. Skills Kit, you can install it on any device. You’re spinning up a web service and register it on Amazon’s website. As long as you have an endpoint, you can register, say, the Amazon Web Services Lambda. Start that up and do something. The Skills Kit is literally the web endpoint response. Amazon Voice Services is a bit more in-depth.

[07:00] – Steps for programming

With the Skills Kit, you register what would be your utterance, your skill name, and you would give it a couple of sets of phrases to accept. Say, you have a skill that can start a car, your skill is “Car Starter.” “Alexa tell Car Starter to start the car.” At which point, your web service will be notified that that is the utterance. It literally has a case statement. You can have any number of individual conditional branches outside of that. The limitation for the Skills Kit is you have to have the “tell” or “ask” and the name of the skill to do whatever. It’s also going to be publicly accessible. For the most part, it’s literally a web service.

[10:55] – Boilerplates for AWS Lambda

Boilerplates can be used if you want to develop for production. If you publish a skill, you get free AVS instance time. You can host your skill for free for some amount of time. There are GUI tools to make it easier but if you’re a developer, you’re probably going to do the spin up a web service and deal it that way.

[11:45] – Do you have to have an Amazon Echo?

At one point, you have to have the Echo but now there is this called Echoism, which allows you to run it in your browser. In addition to that, you can potentially install it on a device like a Raspberry Pi and run Amazon Voice Services. The actual engine is on your PC, Mac, or Linux box. You have different options.

[12:35] – Machine learning

There are certain things that Amazon Alexa understand now that it did last year or time before that like understanding utterances and phrases better. A lot of the machine learning is definitely under the covers. The other portion of it Alexa Voice Service, which is a whole engine that you have untethered access to other portions like how to handle responses. That’s where you can build a custom device and take it apart. So the API that we’re working with here is just using JSON and HTTP.

[16:40] – Amazon Echo Show

You have that full real-time back and forth communication ability but there is no video streaming or video processing ability yet. You can utilize the engine in such a way that Amazon Voice Services can work with your existing tool language. If you have a Raspberry Pi and you have a camera to it, you can potentially work within that. But again, the official API’s and docs for that are not available yet.

[27:20] – Challenges

There’s an appliance in this house that listens to everything I say. There’s that natural inclination to not trust it, especially with the older generations. Giving past that is getting people to use the device. Some of the programming sides of it are getting the communication to work, doing something that Alexa isn’t pre-programmed to do. There isn’t a lot of documentation out there, just a couple of examples. The original examples are written in Java and trying to convert it to Node or JavaScript would be some of the technical challenges. In addition, getting it installed and setup takes at least an hour at the beginning. There’s also a learning curve involved.

[29:35] – Is your product layered in an Echo or is your product a separate device?

Terrance’s product is a completely separate device. One of the functionality of his program is medicine reminders. It can only respond to whatever the API calls from Amazon tells you to respond to but it can’t do anything like send something back. It can do an immediate audio response with a picture or turn on and off a light switch. But it can’t send a message back in like two hours from now. You do want your Alexa device to have (verbally) a list of notifications like on your phone. TLDR, Terrance can go a little further with just the Skills Kit.

[32:00] – Could you set it up through a web server?

Yes. There are examples out there. There’s Alexa in the browser. You can open up a browser and communicate with that. There are examples of it being installed like an app. You can deploy it to your existing iPhone app or Android app and have it interact that way. Or you can have it interact independently on a completely different device like a Raspberry Pi. But not a lot of folks are using it that way.

[33:10] – Monetization

Amazon isn’t changing anything in terms of monetization. They make discovery a lot easier though. If you knew the name of the app, you could just say, “Alexa, [tell the name of the app].” It will do a lazy load of the actual skill and it will add it to your available skill’s list.

However, there is something called the Alexa Fund, which is kind of a startup fund that they have, which you can apply for. If you’re doing something interesting, there is a number of things you have to do. Ideally, you can get funding for whatever your product is. It is an available avenue for you.

[36:25] – More information, documentation, walkthroughs

The number one place to go to as far as getting started is the Amazon websites. They have the Conexant 4-Mic Far-Field Dev Kit. It has 4 mics and it has already a lot of what you need. You have to boot it up and/or SSH into it or plug it up and code it. They have a couple of these kits for $300 to $400. It’s one of the safe and simpler options.

There are also directions for the AVS sites which is under Alexa Voice Services, where you can go to the Github from there. There will give you directions using the Raspberry Pi.  If not that, there’s also the Slack chatroom. It is alexaslack.com. Travis Teague is the guy in charge in there.

Picks

Joe Eames

• Cosmic Engineers by Clifford D. Simak

Aimee Knight

• Conference: React Rally
• Pancakes

Charles Max Wood

• Conference: Angular Dev Summit
• Conference: React Dev Summit
• JavaScript Jabber Slack

Terrance Smith

• Language: Elm
• Youtube channel: The School of Life
• Game: Night in the Woods
• Hacker Ferret Software
• Hackerferret.com

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