So, tonight Amazon held an Alexa + Smarthome tech talk at one of their new buildings in Seattle (which is awesome, btw). The talk itself was fairly uninteresting for the existing development community, as it was targeted at an audience new to the tech. The good thing about the event (aside from free food and drink), was that there were a ton of Alexa team members there for us to pester. And boy did I ever. Recap after the break...
A quick overview of the event. There were three speakers: Amir Aslani, who does product management for Alexa; Frederic Deramat, who is a principal architect for the product; and Charlie Kindel (@ckindel), who is a director of the Alexa Smarthome initiative. Each spoke fairly briefly (maybe 15 min each?), the topics being Alexa 101, the Alexa Platform, and Alexa + Smarthome, respectively. Beforehand and afterwards there was ample time to mill around, snack on some appetizers, and chat with the dev team, a few of whom had some hardware set up.
I feel like they missed an opportunity for Alexa-themed desserts here.
Out of my interactions with the team, there were two that were notable: I had a good conversation with a really intelligent and well spoken employee on the VUI team, and then afterwards I stuck around long enough to have a nice 15 min chat with Frederic. Almost all of the insights below come from these two interaction. Among the things I learned:
- There are some undocumented SSML features that are live today. Upon returning home, I immediately tried them out and confirmed that at least one of them works. Watch for a follow up post on that topic...
- There are some surprisingly good reasons that some of the top-requested features haven't been implemented. A topic that came up in several of my conversations was the question of geolocation, and why we can't know the location of the device triggering the call. Rather than just "because there's no access", everyone I talked to was able to give me a pretty good treatise on the complications of that type of feature, while also assuring me that it's not something they've written off as unsolvable. I'm now less inclined to question the reasoning behind some of these things.
- On the topic of geolocation, I wasn't able to get a direct answer out of anyone on whether Uber or Dominos got special backdoors for location awareness, but it was pretty clear based on the way they spoke around the questions that yes, they did.
- I did, however, learn that they have a program for "managed" partner skills (of which Uber and Dominos are examples). This isn't really surprising, most any large, broad platform is gonna have something like this, but now we have confirmation.
- The certification team definitely works in conjunction with the development teams - they are not an isolated island. I asked this question, and got direct answers that there are people on each team whose job it is to work with the certification org.
- As might be expected, the questions from the attendees mirrored the questions on the forums. Lots of "Why can't we do push notifications?", etc.
- If they keep holding events like this and convincing just a few percent of the attendees to start developing, the platform is going to rapidly balloon...
Standing room only, half an hour before it kicked off...
Finally, lest I be berated by those who couldn't make it, I'll say that I did put in plugs with Frederic for them to work on some of the things that are of most concern to the community (monetization, cross-skill user ids, etc). In the heat of the moment, I did unfortunately forget a few of my hot topics, though. Simplification of their security model will have to wait for another day.
All things considered, I definitely came away from the event with a good feeling about the direction things are going, both short-term and long-term. I unfortunately didn't get a chance to talk to Charlie or Amir - maybe next time! All in all, though, great event.
Did anyone else have a chance to make it out to the event? What did you think?
All things considered, I definitely came away from the event with a good feeling about the direction things are going, both short-term and long-term. I unfortunately didn't get a chance to talk to Charlie or Amir - maybe next time! All in all, though, great event.
Did anyone else have a chance to make it out to the event? What did you think?
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