Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

111 pointsadrianbg7y ago47 comments

I've made a Hacker News skill for Alexa so people can get tech news while driving, cooking, or cleaning. The first version lists post titles and summarizes articles:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CKVDXC3

I'll have lots of time over the next few months to refine it and add things like

  - comment summaries
  - selecting posts by topic, and eventually
  - answering questions about articles

What do you think of the skill? What I should add to it? What do people think about voice assistants in general?

To keep in touch, talk to me on Twitter or by email:

https://twitter.com/AdrianBPatter

adrian@patter.io

47 comments

sjwalter7y ago

This is deadly. Would love if you could feed it custom sources or maybe something like RSS feeds, so I could just "Hey alexa can tell me the top three stories from my feed" or something. No clue if that's possible.

Good stuff!

dguo7y ago

Alexa has a feature called Flash Briefing: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/flashbriefing/understand-t...

I looked into developing one last week, but as far as I can tell, you can't programatically manipulate the feed in any way. You just give it a RSS feed, and it reads the first five results.