The Alexa team has been busy since our last post, with a series of announcements and changes that are sending waves across the development community. We wanted to take a minute to throw out some hot takes about what we've seen.

For months now, rumors have been swirling that Alexa could do a bit more (vocally) than Amazon was letting on. With the dev community actively looking for ways to enhance the skills they build, it was clear a day was coming where that feature would have to be opened up. Well, that day is today...

Word came from on-high today that the Amazon.LITERAL slot type has been granted its reprieve. In terms of functionality, this may not be a huge game changer, but it may be a landmark decision in terms of how Amazon works with its development community. We just want to say a few things about that...

We're starting to see scattered reports across a variety of global regions that there is a new wake word - "COMPUTER" - starting to roll out as devices get the newest firmware. For us here at 3PO-Labs this comes as no surprise, as we noted over a year ago - at the same time we predicted the "ECHO" wake word - that they had special logic for "COMPUTER" already built-in but not complete. This provides us an opportunity to dive back in and see if there's anything new to uncover. Read on for some more technical details, and a running list of the information we can collect...

Just a quick note that "Actions on Google", the Google Home equivalent to the Alexa Skills Kit, is now out of its closed beta. We'll have more to say about this later, after we've had an opportunity to look through the various content provided here: https://developers.google.com/actions/

In the meantime one of our frequent collaborators - Jo Jaquinta of TsaTsaTzu - has already dove head first into Actions with Google, and will be doing a webcast this evening, Friday, December 9 at 6PM PST. You can watch it on Youtube: ​http://youtube.com/jjaquinta/live

We here at 3PO-Labs are very curious folk. It's our drive to reverse engineer and deconstruct that initially pushed us to build Responder, so we could poke and prod at the system. This same nature is what led us down the path of discovering the third wake word a few months before it was released. In that same vein, today we want to talk about another secret (but admittedly limited) aspect of the platform that we believe has not previously been discovered...

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...