[BETA] Alexa - Ask {unofficial} meh stalker what is for sale
25A couple of days ago I got back from a trip out of country, and when I came home, there was a couple of echo dots I ordered on prime day waiting to be opened (cause @dave mentioned they were cool). I hooked them up, played around for a bit, and decided I needed to make a skill.
Fast forward to now, meh stalker is now pending certification approval, and hopefully will be available publicly in the next couple of days.
You will be able to issue commands like:
Alexa, ask meh stalker what is for sale
Alexa, ask meh stalker what was for sale on June 4th
Alexa, ask meh stalker for the current poll
Alexa, ask meh stalker when the last fuku was sold
Alexa, ask meh stalker what went wrong
Alexa, ask meh stalker for help
Known issues:
When asking for historical sales info, the invocation “meh stalker” seems to get mistranslated when specifying a year. Not sure why, but I’ll look into it. Workaround: say “Alexa, open/launch meh stalker and ask what was for sale on June 4th, 2015”
I was also looking at displaying a product image on the Alexa Card, however there are some CORS requirements for the image, one of which is that there cannot be an expiration set. Doing some testing, I don’t think meh (cloudinary) currently meets these requirements, and I don’t feel like re-hosting the images to try and work around it.
If you are interested in trying it out before it is certified, I can add you to the BETA program, which will make the skill available and allow you to test new features before they are launched.
Anybody interested can email lichme@mehstalker.com with the subject “Beta Request” and I’ll get you added ASAP.
If there is a (practical) feature you would like to see, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
I’ll update this posting once I get certified and the skill becomes publicly available.
- 14 comments, 24 replies
- Comment
As a developer, are you able to get a transcript of my commands if I enable your skill?
@medz I am not. At most, I could potentially log which event was fired at what time, but not what was said to trigger it, or by whom it was triggered.
Does this Alexa skill collect users’ personal information? No
This includes anything that can identify the user such as name, email, password, phone number, birthdate, etc.
@lichme Well that’s a relief.
@lichme email sent
@therealjrn Added, you should be good to go.
/giphy un-official
@medz To be fair, it is an official meh stalker product, but is not endorsed by, or affiliated to meh.com
/giphy officially unofficial
Almost makes me want an Alexa!
/youtube downeaster alexa
I have an Echo Dot, but I only use it to listen to music and turn my lights on and off. I just can’t get the hang of asking Alexa to do other things, I just seem to prefer keeping my words to my self.
@fuzzmanmatt Alexa is still young. Alexa is not very deep. Hopefully, yet.
I’d guess turning on, pausing and restarting audio streams is also our most common use of Alexa.
Its weather skill is not deep enough.
Tried to get the $10 promo credit by re-ordering something in our order history. Alexa was confused even tho I was reading the item title directly from the product page - a page that also showed we had previously ordered it.
Amazon Alexa customer service felt bad and gave us a $20 promo credit.
We do like Alexa.
I like my Alexa but trying to get used to remembering to ask her for stuff rather than getting online. She’s probably faster at ordering Pizza Hut than I am! I’m liking my wand also even though I’ll probably only use it for reordering/ordering stuff, the weather and maybe cooking things. @lichme, I sent an email to you, no rush.
@medz, is the official/unofficial like a pet peeve of yours? Goodness knows we all have them, just wondered.
@mehbee nah, I’m just a jerk face
@mehbee All set, should have an email or two.
Hi @lichme! email sent…
Thanks.
@baqui63 All set
@lichme Don’t forget to get your free Dot once your skill gets published!
@metaphore Already submitted, hoping it gets approved on Monday, otherwise I have to hope they run another promo again.
@metaphore if you have a business, creating an Amazon (free) business account also nabs a free Echo Dot.
@lichme This is going to be awesome!
My wife hates Alexa and my shopping…
Now I can combine them. I can already hear the despair.
Thank you.
(Please don’t tell her.)
@2many2no I had to turn off Amazon shipping status updates to keep the Alexa chatter down to a dull roar.
@lichme Unrelated, but any idea why an email alias I’ve only used to sign up for Meh Stalker (mehstalker@<my domain>) has been receiving tons of spam?
@trisk No idea. I set up a few of my own test accounts on mehstalker long ago for this purpose and none of them have been hit with any spam.
@trisk
Domain spam.
I had a friend who gets more than 20000 a day at a test email address that has never been given out.
He set it up just to test. .
More common if your domain has been around for close to two decades
@f00l All email to this domain actually goes to my inbox by default and I get spam at randomly generated addresses once in a while and know what that looks like. It is highly improbable here as this has been a recurring sequence of similar-looking spam messages to this address, and this address alone.
@trisk he totally sells your info to spammers. (Probably not really, though)
@trisk assuming @lichme hasn’t sold your email address
that address @ your domain seems highly unguessable by spam engines.
Could the service hositng your domain have been hacked?
… or @lichme’s server?
Neat
There are two others in the Alexa Skill store currently (I have one here, and someone else has made one).
It was my first skill, and the certification process took a bit of back and forth. Also seems to really depend on who happens to be testing your skill that day. Good luck!
Note: I often had trouble with ‘meh’ in any part of my invocation. Sometimes it worked spot on for a while, other times it would constantly fail (hence switching mine to ‘deal of the day’ to invoke it)
@SkyyPunk You weren’t joking about the certification process. I wen’t back and forth a few times as well. A couple of the items on the reject list weren’t even issues.
This sounds petty cool. If I were using Alexa right now … perhaps I’ll setup an Alexa device and give it a try.
Congrats. I don’t know what doing an Alexa skill gets you besides a Dot, but I hope it brings good things.
Do you have an ETA on the Non-Beta or the approval process?
@f00l If all goes well, as soon as 3-4 hours or so from now (I think the team that approves them does it M-F overnight early morning). The email said it could take 5-7 business days, but reports say current time frame is about 2-3 days. Really just depends on if it gets rejected. There are a ton of reasons why it could. I read up on the most common reasons, and hopefully I avoid a lot of the issues most people run into.
Aside from the dot, and pair of socks, and a bit of knowledge, nothing is gained from making the skill.
Skill got certified, and is now available to the public. It can be found here.
Try it out. Feel free to post suggestions, issues etc. Also, leave a review if you feel like it.
Updated list of commands supported:
Open meh stalker
Ask meh stalker for help
Ask meh stalker what is for sale
Ask meh stalker for deal history from <date>
Ask meh stalker to read the poll
Ask meh stalker when the last fuku was sold
Ask meh stalker what went wrong
Ask meh stalker, who is the goat?
@2many2no I know you don’t want your wife to know, but now you can show her that you’re famous.
@lichme Pretty frickin’ awesome. This is going to be fun.
@lichme so you get a free echo dot now right?
@communist Yeah, and some socks. You’re allowed to sub every month with a different skill, but I missed last month’s by a couple days. Doh!
Finally spent some time playing with your skill, @lichme. I’m not sure how often I’ll use it, but then other things on Alexa that I didn’t initially expect to use much are getting used fairly frequently.
I realize this isn’t on you, at least not directly, but Alexa seems to have difficulty with the word “meh.” I’ve found that pronouncing it closer to “may” works better.
Is the Help response the default one? On several occasions, I’ve gotten the Help response when pausing a bit too long after saying “Alexa, ask meh stalker” and before continuing with the rest of my request.
@baqui63 I noticed that when alexa pronounces “meh”, it comes out as “may”, although during the tests that I ran it was always able to know what my intentions were, possibly because it was able to find a match just on the word “stalker”. Maybe I just have a Canadian accent and pronounce it may stalker and don’t realize it.
As for the default, part of certification requirements is that you provide some sort of follow up response when there is no clear request given. If you activate the skill, with no intent, I have to provide you with some options that you can request, then I also have to keep the request open to give you a chance to respond. The prompt also has to provide the same options that are in the sample utterances on the app page, or it gets rejected.
It should be noted that this default prompt is not the same as help. Default tells you what you can do, help explains what each response does.
@lichme Yes, I noticed Alexa’s pronunciation and saying it her way is what I’ve been doing.
I was unaware of the certification requirements, though I’ll grant that particular one makes sense.
Thanks.