We're super excited to introduce to you our newest Alexa Skill, AstroBot. AstroBot is an aggregator of a few space related APIs, originally inspired by the simple-yet-brilliant howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com. Details, attributions, etc, after the break...

Here at DERP Group, a common topic of conversation is that of "semantic vs syntactic" language for voice assistants, specifically Alexa. The real crux of the discussion is "How do you get a voice assistant to do what you mean, rather than what you say?" This question was was one of the driving forces behind our creation of DiceBot, as we explain in more detail after the break...

There's been a lot of talk in the Alexa dev community lately about all of the tutorial or template based skills that are flooding the market (and of course the related discoverability concerns). All these "build a skill in under an hour" type walkthroughs are great for bringing new devs into the fold, but it got us thinking about what it really takes for an experienced Alexa developer to build something well. The question we came to was "could one of us build a skill from nothing to submission in just one day?". To answer the question, I decided to try it out, all the while cataloging the journey. Read on for more...

We've been heads down working on DERP's Next Big Thing™ (almost there!), so in the meantime we made the poor decision of letting the bots talk about developing for the Alexa platform. All that after the break...

After a couple months of experimenting, infrastructure building, implementing, submitting for certification, and re-implementing (and re-implementing... and re-implementing!), we're unbelievably pumped to announce that our first two skills have finally been published!  With no further ado, please meet...