Unfortunately, I don't see a play button. Not allowed to play in the US?
On 11/25/20 5:51 AM, Jim Cownie wrote:
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
<mailto: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
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a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose
registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
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-- Jim
James Cownie <jcow...@gmail.com <mailto:jcow...@gmail.com>>
Mob: +44 780 637 7146
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