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...

So, Tuesday was the big "Made by Google" event, where they promised that all would be revealed. Leading up to it, the hype train was going full steam ahead.​ We here at 3PO-Labs don't have opinions about most of the announcements (alright, so maybe we have an opinion about whether we need another VR platform), with the exception of Google Home. On that front, we could talk for days...

Just wanted to make a quick note that our name has changed. For the last year (almost to the day) we have been known as DERPGroup, but moving forward we'll be going by 3PO-Labs. We're still building things, breaking things, and talking about everything we love and hate in voice interface. It's just under a different name now.

Our last two posts - about our screwup and about Holocron - have been fairly fun and lighthearted. Aside from the wordplay in the title, this is not one of those posts. Amazon has begun down a path, and we need to talk about why this is a really, really bad move for the platform and for us as developers...

Currently Alexa only recognizes English words. Amazon is just now starting to roll out support for other languages, with German up first. But, what if you want it to match words that aren't words?! That's crazy you say? Or is it?!! We encountered this problem, and this post is going to explain how we approached and solved it.

So, usually we use this blog to do things that are essentially self-promoting. "Look at all the sweet things we build", "Here's an idea to make Alexa better", "We discovered a hidden feature", etc. This is not one of those posts. This one is where we air some dirty laundry, which in turn exposes some issues with the platform as a whole...

Aside from dropping the podcast link last week, it's been a bit of radio silence from us for a while. That doesn't mean nothing has been happening, though, so we figured we'd drop a few relevant links!