Last night in BlackBox on Hill Street in Belfast – I was able to attend my first Belfast AWS User Group meetup and enjoyed two speakers giving talks on AWS recent developments & Codestar and secondly Developing Good Voice User Experiences Using Alexa. The range of recent developments on AWS was apparent – as was indeed the breadth of services that AWS provides. Having recently used during a Swift deployment training exercises – I was pleasantly pleased with the ease of setup and configuration. The AWS Codestar coverage was interesting as it showed how you can get started with a project using the AWS platform by co-coordinating the setup required to get your AWS services going. Its worth noting that the AWS Codestar is not an additional cost – you only pay for the AWS resources you use. The presenter, Ronan Guilfoyle, covered a wide range of areas which will need some deeper research.
The talk on Alexa and adding new skills was illuminating as it showed the tooling and the approaches needed to develop one. Using a recently available Ryanair service – the presenter (Alan Kiernan) showed how to query for flights based on origin, destination and date – and how to handle missing data by prompting. The other areas mentioned were the speech output tailoring and the various features for emphasis such as whispering. Using a Raspberry Pi as an Alexa test platform was indicated. Will have to take a deeper look at that.
Thanks goes out to the sponsors and speakers for an meetup that has lots of promise.