[sjwalter]

This is deadly. Would love if you could feed it custom sources or maybe something like RSS feeds, so I could just "Hey alexa can tell me the top three stories from my feed" or something. No clue if that's possible.

Good stuff!

[dguo]

Alexa has a feature called Flash Briefing: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/flashbriefing/understand-t...

I looked into developing one last week, but as far as I can tell, you can't programatically manipulate the feed in any way. You just give it a RSS feed, and it reads the first five results.

[adrianbg]

Yeah, I don't think it's intended to be interactive. More like a really quick curated news update.

[dguo]

Yep. The rigidity creates issues though.

As a user: 1) The only thing I can really control is what sources are in my feed and the order. For example, I added NPR, but it reads out the entire story instead of just the titles. And the stories are so long that I removed NPR completely.

As a developer: 1) I tried creating a flash briefing for a particular subreddit, but the Alexa developer console said the feed could not be parsed even though I could open the feed just fine in Firefox. From what I could tell, the backend was being very strict with what constitutes a valid feed. If I could use code, I would just fetch the feed and parse it myself. Since I can't, it seems like there's nothing I can do.

2) I was also surprised to learn that existing skills can't serve as flash briefing sources. It'd be great if I could add your HN skill to my briefings, but as I understand it, you'd have to create/host a RSS feed and then create yet another skill that is just a flash briefing one.

[adrianbg]

I find Amazon's products often have bizarre constraints like that. They seem to do well anyway though :/

Thanks for your comments! I wonder if I can create some kind of personalized briefing based on which stories people seem interested in.

[adrianbg]

Yeah, RSS feeds are definitely on my mind as well.