Creating A Custom Amazon Alexa Skill

Ryan Nguyen .NET, Articles, Azure, Conversational Apps, Programming, Tutorial 1 Comment

With the explosion of the internet of things (IoT), many companies are competing to create the best smart home ecosystem for consumers.

Amazon Echo, for instance, is a robust system that allows the user to interact with their smart devices via voice command. Alexa is the application that the Echo communicates with, essentially the brain of the Amazon Echo. It controls how your Amazon Echo communicates with your other smart devices and services. It can sync with a variety of smart devices including switches, thermostats, garage doors, sprinklers, door locks, music streamers, news outlets, and more. It alsoย allows the third-party companies to create custom skills which are then accessible through the Amazon Echo.

In this blog I willย discuss the Amazon Echo and its Alexa application. We will go through the process to create a custom Alexa skill about the Keyhole blog, paying particular attention to keywords you’ll need to understand when you create your own Skill. From there, we’ll show how to test a Skill via simulators and deploy it to your Amazon Echo.

Getting Started With Ionic 2

Adam Costenbader Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Mobile, Tutorial, TypeScript Leave a Comment

Everyone wants to have an “App” to represent them, their company, or just to perform some common task they might have in mind.

The problem with this is that there is so much to mobile app development. iPhone apps require that you have a Mac to compile them. Android apps have to deal with platform fragmentation. iPhone apps can mean working with Objective C, Android can mean Java– and if you aren’t a polyglot and fluent both these languages, you probably feel that mobile app development is quite the daunting task.

Luckily, though, there are other options to choose from – like the Ionic 2 framework. In this blog, we’ll show just how easy it is to get up and running with Ionic 2 by creating a reference mobile application. By the end of this blog, our application will have the ability to run in the browser, emulator, or be built-out to run on a device.

Controlling Unity3D Using C#, Part 2

Greg Yotz .NET, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Mobile, Tutorial, Unity3D Series 1 Comment

Attention: This article was published over 10 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. While some topics are evergreen, technology moves fast, so please keep that in mind as you read the post.Welcome back! This is part two of a three-part blog series on Unity 3D. In part one we discussed how to get started with …

Getting Started Building 3D Simulations In Unity3D, Part 1

Greg Yotz .NET, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Mobile, Tutorial, Unity3D Series 2 Comments

Attention: This article was published over 10 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. While some topics are evergreen, technology moves fast, so please keep that in mind as you read the post.Welcome to part one of a three-part blog series on Unity 3D. In this series, we will create a simple 3D game in Unity3D …

In Your Face! Figuring Out Apple’s Face Detection API

Derek Andre API Development, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Mobile, Tutorial 3 Comments

Attention: This article was published over 10 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. While some topics are evergreen, technology moves fast, so please keep that in mind as you read the post.I am making a native iOS app that has face detection. Apple has an awesome image detection API that can find faces, barcodes, and …