After what seems like an unconscionably long wait, the Alexa team announced earlier this week that they were finally giving us a way to look up the timezone of a given user. The feature was detailed in a blog post, with a new page documenting the "Settings API" (which is what contains the timezone feature) going up simultaneously. This may seem like a pretty straightforward change, but between the history and the implementation, there's actually a fair bit to unpack here. So let's dive in...

We wanted to take just a moment to talk about a new Alexa feature, our implementation of it in AstroBot (our space API aggregator skill), and thoughts about how to best take advantage of the new capability.

As mentioned in our previous post, we've had the opportunity to play around with the new Alexa push notifications feature for some time now. While the exact implementation details on the Alexa Skills Kit side are still not public (and therefore not something we can talk about yet until the public beta goes live), there are enough consumer-facing pieces that we CAN talk about that should be of interest to folks starting to think about their push notification use cases.