So, some exciting news from Amazon today - the first batch of skills with push notifications enabled from the private beta have finally been released. Unfortunately, in their official post Amazon called out several skills as exemplars of the new feature, but failed to mention that we at 3PO-Labs were also in the beta, and also have a live skill with notifications: AstroBot. In fact, due to a clerical error with certification a couple months ago, we were actually the very first third-party skill to go live with notifications. We've been incognito ever since, but we're relieved to finally be able to talk about what we've done...
| For our AstroBot notifications, the first thing we decided to tackle is launch notifications. We were finding that one of the most annoying things about AstroBot's "upcoming launches" functionality was that it was a pull model where you had to remember to check for launches. With the push model, we now have the ability to send out reminders each morning where there is a launch happening that day. |  |
The way it works is that you simply open Astrobot, and say "Enable Notifications". If you haven't granted notification permissions in the Alexa app yet, this will prompt you to do so at that time. Otherwise, that's all it takes, and you're good to go. Right now the system is a firehose, but in the future we'd like to provide targeted notifications as well that would let you be informed only of launches for a specific agency, for example.
On our side, we simply check Launch Library once a day for upcoming launches, and if one of them exists, we query our database for all of our users who have asked to enable notifications, and then we broadcast out to them a list of all launches for that day. If there are no launches in the next 24 hours, we don't send any notifications. Simple!
On our side, we simply check Launch Library once a day for upcoming launches, and if one of them exists, we query our database for all of our users who have asked to enable notifications, and then we broadcast out to them a list of all launches for that day. If there are no launches in the next 24 hours, we don't send any notifications. Simple!
We'd love to hear what you think of our concept, and any other ideas we should implement now that we're able to work with push notifications! And if you enjoy AstroBot, we'd be "over the moon" if you could leave us a review. Direct feedback about the skill is also greatly appreciated.
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