> I assumed this was Alexa not understanding a Scottish accent. Cue mandatory sketch https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hbfjw <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hbfjw> (may be viewed as NSFW...)
Voice Activated Elevator Burnistoun is a sketch show that first aired in 2009. Here, Iain Connell and Robert Florence star in a skit about a lift that doesn’t speak Scottish. > On 25 Nov 2020, at 10:41, John Hearns <hear...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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 > <mailto: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 >> <mailto: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. > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf -- Jim James Cownie <jcow...@gmail.com> Mob: +44 780 637 7146
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