Aha. I did not know about the 8 second limit. I use Alexa with a Philips smart lighting hub to control house lights. Sometimes nothing happens... I assumed this was Alexa not understanding a Scottish accent. I forgive Alexa now - she might have been having trouble talking to the Hue.
On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 at 10:21, Tim Cutts <t...@sanger.ac.uk> wrote: > Indeed, my main personal experience with Lambda so far has been in writing > an Alexa skill in my spare time. It’s been quite fun, and very instructive > in the benefits and pitfalls of lambda. > > My main takehomes so far: > > 1. I love the fact that there’s basically no code at all other than that > required to deliver the actual skill. Just handler functions for the > incoming requests (Intents, as Amazon call them) > > 2. Debugging is awkward. There is no interactive debugging, as far as I > can tell. Log inspection is about all you have, and some errors are > obtuse (for example, some valid Node.js constructs produce syntax errors on > Lambda, and it’s very hard to track down when it happens - unit tests all > pass locally but then you get a syntax error in the LogWatch logs, with a > useless stack trace that doesn’t tell you where the syntax error is). > Debugging and unit testing on your laptop is hard to do; many Alexa APIs > rely on real hardware functions and the simulators don’t handle them. > > 3. Persistence of data is fairly straightforward using S3 buckets or > DynamoDB, and I haven’t noticed latency issues with those (of course the > interactions are on a human timescale, so latency isn’t really much of an > issue) > > 4. Interaction with external services can be problematic; Alexa lambda > functions must return within 8 seconds, which can be fun if your skill > needs to fetch data from some other source (in my case a rather sluggish > data service in Azure run by my local council), and there’s no clean way to > handle the event if you hit the 8 second limit, the function just gets > terminated and Alexa returns a rather meaningless error to the user. > > Tim > > On 25 Nov 2020, at 09:45, John Hearns <hear...@gmail.com> wrote: > > BTW, I am sure everyone knows this but if you have a home assistant such > as Alexa everytime you ask Alexa it is a lambda which is spun up > > > -- The Wellcome Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a > charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered > in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, > London, NW1 2BE. >
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