Today we're very thrilled to announce a new BotTalk Release codenamed InSight. It's all about broadcasting good news to your users - via Alexa Flash Briefings! And that's how it works:
Alexa Flash Briefings
Alexa has this unique feature that other assistants don't: A user can say:
Alexa, what's on the News today?
And the customized Flash Briefing is brought to a user - from all the different sources. No need to remember the names of the skills, no voice commands to learn. That's just THAT easy. And this is the reason, why so many Alexa users simply love that feature.
But here is the BIG problem: there are not enough GOOD Flash Briefings out there:
Perhaps one of the reason is the way Flash Briefings are done today. Amazon allows you just to take RSS or JSON feed - and use that as your data source for a flash briefing.
But we all know, that something that was written to be read - doesn't always sound great on voice assistant.
Also, the whole concept of RSS feed was created ages ago, when we used to open our "rss reader" and update the feed once a day.
But what if you want your Flash Briefing to update dynamically each time a user opens it? For instance, insert some dynamic data into your content:
Alexa, what's on the News today?
That's your Flash Briefing. From the Local Times. Today, Amazon announced a whole range of new device. The current price of Amazon stock is {{ dynamic value }}.
Or what if you want to grab several RSS feeds, combine them and adjust for voice?
Well, you can do it now. With BotTalk!
Unique Flash Briefing Solution
The solution BotTalk architects have created is truely unique on the market.
To help you started with your great Flash Briefing we created two new templates:
We acknowledge the fact that many users don't have any servers, but would still love to keep their news dynamic and editable. For those users we created a template that uses Google Spreadsheet as a data source for a Flash Briefing.
At the same time, we want to give you an opportinity to create Flash Briefings with BotTalk alone, without any third-party tools. Just write your content right there in BotTalk's editor:
- name: Output Flash Briefing
actions:
- flashBriefing:
source: records
records:
- title: First News
date: '2018-12-10'
text: In the first news there is a text message.
link: 'http://example.com'
- title: Second News
date: '2018-12-09'
text: >
Here is the second news. We need more space. Because
we will have several lines of text here.
So just for the sake of readability, we need to use the greater then sign.
link: 'http://example.com'
- title: Third News
date: '2018-12-08'
text: This will not read, because we have a stream.
stream: 'https://smarthaustech.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Obama-State-Of-The-Union-2010-SoundBible.com-1976559822.mp3'
link: 'http://example.com'
And if you want to have something truely unique and dynamic - use the full power of BotTalk to call APIs, mix and match the data, be creative:
- name: Make API Calls
actions:
- getUrl:
url: 'https://example-stock-prices-api.com'
- set: 'stock_prices = urlResponse.data.prices'
- getUrl:
url: 'https://custom-news-feed.com'
- set: 'news = urlResponse.feed'
next: Output Flash Briefing
- name: Output Flash Briefing
actions:
- flashBriefing:
source: records
records:
- title: '{{ news[0].heading }}'
date: '{{ news[0].date }}'
text: >
The latest news: {{ news[0].newsText }}.
The current price of Amazon stock is {{ stock_prices.AMZN }}.
link: '{{ news[0].url }}'
We can't wait to hear all the great flash briefings you guys will come up with!
Your Feedback
This release would not be possible without the insightful and detailed feedback from our users.
Do you want to request a feature or leave your feedback?
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Thanks
None of this would be even nearly plausible, if it weren't for the team of the best developers we have the honour to work with.
You guys never cease to amaze us! Please do sleep sometimes!
We 💛 you all =)
