Welcome to another episode of the ’Create Your Kindspace’ podcast, with me your host Caroline Laurenson. Create Your Kindspace is all about wellbeing and the different ways in which we care for ourselves and those around us.
In today’s episode, we’re diving into the world of Alexa smart speakers. Last month I had the huge honour of performing a show as part of the Aberdeen Science Festival and I wanted to share it with you too. The show covered some of our favourite family-friendly tips and tricks to help you make the most of your Alexa. There’s so much that people don’t know about these devices, so let’s jump in and discover how Alexa can create a kinder, smarter space for you and your family.
Timestamps:
00:01:10 Introduction and Overview
00:08:33 Important Data Privacy Advice
00:14:09 Getting Started and the Basics
00:16:02 Family-Friendly Features
00:18:36 Customising Your Alexa Experience
00:20:30 Some Alexa Skills to Try
00:25:57 Flash Briefings and Widgets
00:30:18 Hidden Features and Accessibility
00:33:07 It’s Quiz Time
00:36:57 Inspiring the Next Generation of Voice Developers
00:38:19 Resources for Further Learning
00:39:32 End of the Show Alexa Musical Piece
Links:
What can I say to Alexa? Book: https://tltechsmart.com/what-can-I-say-to-Alexa
HuggingFace https://huggingface.co/
Claude https://claude.ai/
Amazon Party Rock https://partyrock.aws/
Voice Flow https://www.voiceflow.com/
Vector Shift https://vectorshift.ai/
Alexa Skills Kit: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/start
Alexa Developers on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbx0SPpWT6yB7_yY_ik7pmg
Dabble Lab: https://learn.dabblelab.com/alexa/
Codecademy: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-alexa
Transcript:
Caroline: Alexa, tell me a technology joke.
Eilidh: I’m reading a book about antigravity. It’s impossible to put down.
Caroline: Alexa, tell me another one.
Eilidh: Sorry, I’m having trouble. Please try again in a little while.
Caroline: Argh!
Caroline: Does this feel familiar? I bet it probably does if you have an Alexa Smart speaker. Thank you to Eilidh for being such a wonderful assistant. You will be seeing more of Eilidh as we go through the show this evening.
Caroline: So there are lots of things that Alexa can help us with, but it’s not always easy to know what to say and how to get the best out of the technology. So over the next 45 minutes-ish, I will be your guide as we journey through some of my favourite Alexa features and share with you some of my favourite tips on… and hopefully you will be able to go home and try some of the things that you learn this evening. So I am Caroline. I love all things STEM. I’m an engineer by background, and for the last six years, I have been running a smart home technology company with my amazing husband, Thomas. So mainly what we do is we go to people’s houses and we help to set up these technologies and help people to learn about these technologies. But we also like to have fun with Alexa, too. And yes, I love crafting and those sorts of things as well. I could sing in the microphone, but I won’t do that. I won’t do that tonight.
Caroline: So now you know a bit about me. It would be great if I could get to know you a little bit better as well and find out where you’re at with your Alexa knowledge. So a quick show of hands. Who already has an Alexa smart speaker? Okay, so that’s quite… probably the majority then. That’s good. And could you tell me again with a show of hands, do you use it for playing music? Yeah, pretty much everyone. What about setting timers and reminders? A little bit less, yeah, but that one’s still pretty popular. What about using it for controlling other things in the home? Things like your TV and your smart home. You’re obviously going to put your hand up. We have a lot of things in our house. Yeah, so not quite as many, but yeah, there’s a few, there’s a few. Then what about using apps on your Alexa? How many of you have used an app? Alexa or Amazon… they’re called skills, so you might not realise that they’re apps. We’ve got one hand. So not that many. So not to worry, because that is one of the things that we’re going to talk about tonight. When you go home, you will have a whole world to unlock in your smart speaker that you didn’t even realise was there. We’ve talked a bit about some of the things that we use Alexa for, but there are 25 million people in the UK that have smart speakers or access to an Alexa smart speaker. What do you think people in the UK like to use, or like to do the most on their Alexa? We do have an answer.
Audience Member: Ask it to make farting noises.
Caroline: Have you ruined my punchline? Oh, well, I was going to get Alexa to help me with this question. So, Alexa, how many times are you asked to break wind in a day?
Eilidh: From cancerresearchuk dot Org, on average, people pass wind about 15 to 20 times a day.
Caroline: Oh, dear. This is going to be a long show. Thank you, Alexa. So yes, Alexa doesn’t actually know the answer to that question, but Amazon, the company that make Alexa, they publish a report every year around December time. And in that report, it shares all the trends and data and statistics around what we use our Alexa for. And yes, would you believe that Alexa being asked to pass wind is really high up here on the list? And there are over 60 apps. So I went into the Alexa skill store and counted up all the different ones related on that topic. Over 60 apps in the store on that topic alone. So now you’re maybe thinking, what a total waste of technology. Why are there people being paid to create this kind of stuff? This is ridiculous, honestly. But what I maybe will stress, and hopefully what will come across in tonight’s show is that these technologies it’s really good for them to be fun as well as functional. And some of the most popular things on Alexa are actually games and things which are more entertaining. So it’s probably not that surprising, actually. People like to ask their smart speaker to do silly things, like make songs about farts or… Yeah, lots of silly things, silly jokes, but it keeps us entertained.
Caroline: But of course, there are lots of other things that Alexa can do which are, in fact, really useful. So many things that I wrote a whole book about it, and I love to talk about it. It’s something that we do in our work. It’s something that I’m really passionate about sharing with others. And some of the things we’ve talked about already, so listening to music, reading books, listening to podcasts, checking on the news, setting your timers and alarms when you’re doing tasks around the house, like cooking. You can link it up to your calendar. That one’s really really useful. Even simple things like checking the weather before you leave or checking the traffic before you leave the house. So many things that Alexa can do. And of course, it would be impossible for me to cover all of this this evening. And I guess what I’m hoping is that you leave with some curiosity about what Alexa can do and hopefully feel a little bit more confident about trying things and yeah have fun with it and see what things work for you.
Caroline: So what are we going to cover tonight? We’re going to run through some important information about data privacy and some of the basics, just in case you maybe are new to Alexa. And then we’ll get on to how to customise your smart speaker with things like the skills, the apps that we mentioned, flash briefings, which is related to skills, and then another thing called widgets, which is a super special new thing that not many people have discovered yet on their devices. And of course, I’m going to share some of our favourite family features and insider tips for you to try when you get home.
Caroline: So data privacy Now, the reason I wanted to start here is because I know there are a lot of barriers to using these technologies. And one of the biggest, and actually, it’s the question we get asked the most in our business, people are like, Is it listening all the time? And they worry about where’s their data going? What does Amazon do with their data? Are the recordings shared with others? Is the information secure? And those are all really genuine worries. So I thought it would be good to share some of my top tips, and then we can get on with some more of the fun stuff.
Caroline: So top tip number one is to go into the Amazon Alexa smartphone app and review your privacy settings. So you might be surprised to learn that out of the box, when you purchase your device and you plug it in, the default setting is for it to actually retain all of your recordings and transcriptions, and then Amazon have access to that, and they use it within their development activities to improve overall how Alexa operates. But out of the box, you’re sharing a lot of information that you maybe didn’t realise. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I do think it’s good for people to have a choice and awareness about what they are and aren’t sharing. So we always encourage people to go into the settings, see what it looks like, and you’ll have more awareness, and you can make a conscious decision about, do you want to share that information or do you not? One thing I would say is, when it comes to the Alexa voice recognition, I think sharing voices which are rarer, so the Scottish dialect and the way that we speak, having, or Amazon collecting that information to make the device work better for people with Scottish voices, I think is a positive, but there’s a trade-off. So, yes, have a think about where you sit in terms of how much information you’re comfortable with sharing.
Caroline: The next thing I wanted to recommend was setting up voice profiles. So when you get your device, what it should do is ask you if you want it to learn your voice. And you might be thinking, Oh, I don’t if I did do that, or maybe you skipped past that step when you plugged in the device, or if you’ve had it for a long time, then maybe that feature wasn’t available when you bought your device. So if you aren’t sure, all you need to ask is, you would say, Alexa, who is speaking? And then it would let you know if it knows who you are. And if it doesn’t know who you are, it will probably prompt you, Would you like me to learn your voice? Then the other shortcut or the other command you can use is you can just say, Alexa, learn my voice. And then what the device does is it guides you through a few phrases that you repeat after me, and then it collects that data, and then it creates this profile so it always knows who you are in the future. So that’s super handy if you live in a house with multiple different people and you maybe have apps that you use that you want to be able to yeah… Only you can have access to. So that’s a good one.
Caroline: If you are really concerned about it listening all of the time, there are physical ways that you can shut off the device without having to completely unplug it. So you can turn the microphone off. And the way that you do that is there’s just a button on the top. You know when it’s been disabled because the light will turn red on the device. And when it’s red, that means the microphone is switched off. And then if you have a device with a screen, they have… Well, the old devices don’t, but the newer devices have a little shutter, and you can just slide the shutter over. If you have an older device, I’ve seen people literally just get a post-it note or something like that and stick it over the camera, so it’s easy to take on and off. So that’s another good tip for you.
Caroline: And then the last thing I would say is it’s good to go in, and this is probably related to the first point that I made about going in and checking your settings. It’s really helpful to go in and look at what Alexa is transcribing. And the reason I say that is because quite often it doesn’t understand you correctly. And you can have this frustration of, why is this not working? And this is a really good way to troubleshoot as well to work out. What did it think that I said? And then if you need to modify the words that you’re using or the way that you you’re saying the words, and then hopefully you’ll have better success on your Alexa. And once you go into the transcriptions, it’s actually super easy to manage individual entries from there. So you can delete anything that you want to delete. Or if you actually decide, I want to delete everything from a certain day, you can do that, or you can do it with your voice just by saying, Alexa, delete everything I said today, or Alexa, delete everything I said this week, and then it will just do that automatically in your account for you. So yes, we’ve gone through some really important stuff there on data privacy.
Caroline: I don’t want to get ahead of myself too much and maybe just go through some of the basics with you. So Alexa works by a wake word. So only when it hears the wake word does it then start listening for the next command. You can actually change the wake word. So the options instead of Alexa are Echo, Amazon, Computer, or Ziggy. And then once you’ve woken the device up, you just need to give your command. And that might be things like asking questions. So you might say, Alexa, what time is it? Or you might, for music, you might say, play songs by Benson Boone. I know the kids are all wild about Benson Boone just now. I would recommend that Alexa works best with transactional requests, so quite simple things. So it’s usually you have a job to be done and the device is helping you to complete that task. And yeah, commands that are quite short. So saying things like stop and resume. If you want to play audio or stop audio or go back to listening to something that you’ve paused. Controlling the volume, you can do all that remotely with your voice as well, which is pretty cool. So turning up the volume or putting it to a specific level with numbers.
Caroline: It’s great for communication. So you can answer a phone call just by saying answer, which is really cool. And then my top tip, if you ever get stuck and Alexa is not listening, you just say, Alexa, exit, and that’s the master command that shuts everything down and takes you back to the start again. So exit’s always is a good one if you get to a point where you’re like, this is really not working, and this is not listening.
Caroline: So onto some of my recommended settings and features, specifically for families. So I have three things to share, but if you only do one thing after leaving today, I’d encourage you to set up the emergency help feature. So you can do this through the smartphone app. What you do is you add a number to use as your emergency contact. And then when you say, Alexa, call for help, it will call this number. And if there’s no answer, it will also send a message. So your emergency contact will be alerted that the device has been activated, the help function has been activated. So really, really helpful facility. I think this and the communication features overall are just so helpful, especially if you have older people in your family or people that are remote from you that you want to be able to check in on. And I think it just gives that level of peace of mind and security that you can always get hold of someone if there was to be an emergency.
Caroline: The next thing, top tip, is that turn off your voice purchasing. So again, out of the box, this won’t be switched off by default. And there’s been ever so many funny stories in the past on the internet of people ordering things and it arriving at the house and then being like, I did not order this. Where did this come from? So especially with kids in the house, really have a look at that and switch off. Again, that’s in the Alexa smartphone app, so you can go in and you can disable that. Definitely a good idea.
Caroline: And then the third thing is just around content, which is appropriate for young people. They have this thing called the profanity filter that blocks any music with explicit lyrics. You can turn that off with your voice. You would just say block explicit lyrics, or you can do that in through the smartphone app. If at any point you wanted to turn the filter off, really the main way to do that is in the smartphone app. It’s quite difficult to do that with your voice unless you’ve told it in advance that you want to be able to do it with your voice, but you see in the example here on the screen. So top three tips, and we’ve covered some of the basics now.
Caroline: So let’s dive into some of the more advanced features and ways that you can customise your Alexa device. So I asked about apps before. Amazon call them skills. They are… the way I explain it, it’s a bit like how you get apps for mobile phones. So you go into an app store and then you can add things onto your smartphone. So it’s really similar. There’s an app store that Amazon have curated. Some of the content is created by Amazon, some is created by companies like ours. So another part of our business is we create this software that adds extra functionality to your smart speaker. So it’s really, it’s a growing… What would you call it? A growing ecosystem with lots of different developers of differing quality. So some of the stuff that’s in there is complete rubbish, and it can be a bit of a hit or miss. And so what I wanted to do tonight was share some of our favourite ones. There’s actually over 100,000 different apps in the store. And unfortunately, Amazon aren’t very good at… They’re a marketplace, and this is their job, and they’re very good at selling things. But for some reason on the Alexa side, they’re not very good at helping consumers find the content that matches their needs. So it’s not always the easiest to find things. Often on our social media, we will share new ones that we find and try and give people tips on things to try. So they’re some of our favourite ones. And actually what I love the most about these apps is to use them, all you need to know is the magic words. So if you find an app that you like, then you just say Alexa Open and then the name of the skill. So for example, you could say, Alexa, open bin calendar. And this app is super cool. So when you activate it, when you open it, it asks you to give the days and the frequency of your bin collections, and then anytime you need a reminder, you just say, Alexa, what bin is it this week? And then it’ll let you know what colour it is or is it paper? So that’s one that we literally use every single week.
Caroline: Some of the other favourite ones I’ve shared, topical because we’ve got Halloween coming up, well, in a month’s time, but as of next week, so from the start of October, you can say, Alexa, open Count Dracula, and then you can do a fun Halloween countdown. So it’s a bit like how many sleeps is it for Christmas, but it’s like how many sleeps is it till Halloween? So that one’s really nice, really cute. And then the last three that are shown on the right-hand side there are ones that we that you’ve actually made. So we have one called Phocus Space, which is a Pomodoro Timer. So it’s a productivity technique that people like to use, like if they’re studying or working, and it helps to make sure that you’re taking breaks at an appropriate time and it helps you to get through your workload efficiently. So that’s a really nice one. Then we have our Kindspace application, which is focused on wellbeing. So it does a little check-in with you every day to see how you’re doing. And it has lots of tips and advice on different wellbeing topics. And then it also has activities, so things like bedtime stories and journaling exercises, breathing exercises, that thing.
Caroline: And then the last one, which is one of our newer ones, is called My Scottish Community. So we actually got Innovate UK grant funding to work in collaboration with the Health and Social Care Alliance. So this is a national resource, and we basically took this really large database that sat on a website and we’ve made it voice accessible. So there’s thousands and thousands of different services and organisations across Scotland that help people with their health and wellbeing. And now they can go on My Scottish Community and find out more about these services and contact details. So that’s a really beautiful one, and we were so happy to be able to bring that to Alexa
Caroline: So I think what I would do or what I would say is I’d encourage you to have a look at the store. So you can do that either on your computer on the Amazon website or on the Alexa smartphone app, and you can browse through and see what you want to have a go at.
Caroline: Before I move on, I put a little circle around this word launch. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that that is the only one that says launch. So Amazon have a wonderful habit of changing things and not telling people, and sometimes changing things, and you don’t really understand the rationale for it. So about nearly two years ago, they changed the way that you.. The way that you open an app for the first time. So I use the analogy of the smartphone store, where you go and you find an app and then you download it onto your phone. When you find an app that you like on Amazon or on Alexa, you don’t actually download it. You just add it to your account in the cloud. And the beauty of that is that you can use it across any of your devices. So if you had lots of different smart speakers, or you had a Fire TV, or you had a Kindle tablet, these apps will work on all of those devices because they’re all linked to the same account. But what that… I don’t know. Amazon have decided that now when you want to add it to your account, you have to say launch, enable, or start. You can’t say open the very first time. And then any time after that, as long as it’s added to your account, you can say open as much as you like after that. And it’s so confusing for people. And it’s honestly, Thomas and I have had such a nightmare this last few weeks trying to explain to the My Scottish Community team about this difference and that we actually have no control sometimes over how the technology is designed and how Amazon implement the changes. So maybe I’ve laboured that point too much, but what I would say is if you find an app and you can’t get it to open for the first time, that’s probably the issue. Some… Or another thing you can try, which sometimes works, is being more specific about the words that you use. So adding the word skill on to the end of it. So you could say, Alexa, launch my Scottish Community skill, and then it knows that it’s looking for that and not any other inbuilt Amazon features, because that, unfortunately, can be a problem as well. Or it might try and find a book or a podcast or something that’s got a similar name. But if you put the word skill on the end, then that should help. So some tips around skills.
Caroline: The other thing I wanted to share, which people might I’ve not heard of, which is also really helpful, is a thing called flash briefings. So they’re like a special kind of skill that is mainly for audio content, and it’s mainly for things that are regularly updated. So if you think about things like the news, the weather, podcasts, your horoscope, if you’re into that thing. And if you imagine the scenario of your alarm clock going off in the morning, you have your morning routine and you maybe would listen to the radio, this is like an alternative to that where it’s your own curated feed. So it will play your own special audio feed of the things that you’ve chosen to add to your flash briefing. And it’s fairly easy to do. So you find the content that you want to add to your flash briefing, you can add it with your voice or you can add it in the smartphone app. And then when you want to play it, you can set it up as a routine, like linked to your alarm clock, like I mentioned, or you can just say, Alexa, What’s my flash briefing? And then it will play all that audio content one after another. So the flash briefings are quite helpful. Again, the Amazon store isn’t great because it doesn’t properly differentiate between what’s a normal skill and what’s a flash briefing skill. So you have to manually go in and read the description to work out whether it’s something that is compatible to be added to your flash briefings list. So… Yes, helpful, but sometimes a little bit hard to find things that will work as a flash briefing.
Caroline: And then the next one, which is something that only actually works on the devices with a screen is the widgets. So widgets are quite new. I don’t know. I didn’t ask before, does anyone have a device with a screen? We got a few people. Yeah. So the widgets are fairly new. At the moment, there’s only about 60. Before, when we were talking about skills, we said there’s over 100,000, but at the moment, there’s only about 60 widgets. You can think about these as handy little shortcuts that sit as a tile on your screen. It allows you to access all your favourite content a lot quicker and acts as a bit of a visual reminder as well, because it’s not like on your smartphone where you can scroll and you can find the apps that you’re looking for. I think on Alexa, sometimes it’s like out of sight, out of mind. You might have an app that you forget about because you’re only accessing it with your voice and you can’t visually see it. So this is super helpful for things like reminders, calendars, shopping lists, the weather. This device here on the screen is the Alexa Show 15, so it’s almost like a family command centre. It’s really helpful if you have a family to try and help you get organised, you can leave each other little sticky notes and things as well. The widgets are new, but quite an exciting space. We’ve developed quite a few widgets now. Claim to fame is we are on the editorial pick list at number 6. We’re the top 6 app for our Phocus space app. That seems to be very popular. Who knew? When we, we built it by accident. We had a student come and work with us, or a graduate, should I say, and we didn’t want to throw her in at the deep end doing all this coding for our main Kindspace application. We said to her, what would you like to build? We’ll find a simple use case, and then you can build it end-to-end, and you can come up with the creative content as well, the visual of how it will look and the sound. And yeah so she created this Pomodoro Timer, and it’s number six in the Amazon Editorial Top Picks list. We never really intended it to be so popular, but it is. That is a good story, a nice story.
Caroline: Yes, so I have covered a lot. I feel like there’s so much more that I could tell you. We haven’t even really got into routines and all the smart home stuff, but I know there’s only so much information that you can absorb. I also know that when you get a new piece of technology, I think you can be enthusiastic in the beginning and you might explore all the features and have some fun setting up things. And invariably, what happens is you just find that favourite setting and you just keep going back to it. I always say to people, it’s a bit like your washing machine. So you get your washing machine and it’s got all these different functions. And then every time you go to it, you’re like, Oh, yeah, that one will do. And then you just keep going back to the same one. And I think that smart speakers can end up falling into that same trap and that they can do so much and it can be so overwhelming that you gravitate to the things that you know and the things that are easy.
Caroline: I think also there’s a lot of things that are hidden, and that was why I wanted to share tonight some of the things that maybe you wouldn’t have heard about before. So my all-time favourite feature is definitely a hidden feature because it actually sits in the accessibility settings. So if you go into the accessibility settings, unfortunately, this only works on the devices with a screen. But if you go onto your device, swipe down on the top of the screen, go into the settings and into accessibility, there’s a really magic thing called Tap to Alexa. And Tap to Alexa has existed for a very long time, long before widgets. But I actually have a lot of similarities with the widget. So you can set up your own little shortcuts. Once you’ve enabled it, then it puts this extra little icon on your screen with a little finger. And then when you tap on that finger, it brings up all these little shortcuts. When you add it onto your device, it gives you some examples, basically, so some things to get started. But then you can tap on the plus button and then you can add new things. So we like to use it a lot with our customers. One of the main things we use it for is when we go and do demos, often we’re in places where it’s quite noisy and there’s a lot of background noise. So actually speaking to the speaker would be impossible. And so Tap to Alexa, we can set up lots of demos and shortcuts where we don’t actually need to speak to the device because we’ve typed in what we want the command to be instead. So I love to Tap to Alexa. You can be really creative as well and coming up with ideas of what you can use it for. And I just think it’s so beautiful because it’s been created as an accessibility feature, but actually it’s really useful for everybody. So I’d encourage I do to have a look at the Accessibility settings and see what else you find that’s useful. And then…
Caroline: Yes, it’s quiz time, so you better have been paying attention. I’ll check how we’re doing for time as well. Yes, it’s quiz time. Eilidh is going to help us with a quick recap. Okay, so first question, how do I manage my data privacy on Alexa? So do we think it’s A, in the settings in the Alexa app, and we go into data privacy and then manage your Alexa data, or only speak in whispers around Alexa so it doesn’t hear? What do you think?
Audience Member: A.
Caroline: Okay. Do you want to see? Just this one here. Yes, it is. It’s A. I have to also admit that Eilidh helped me with these slides as well, didn’t you? Because she loves making slides on PowerPoint. So yes, that’s right. What I wanted to add as a little side point is, have you ever tried whispering to Alexa? Yeah. What happens?
Audience Member: She whispers back.
Caroline: I know. It’s quite clever, isn’t it? So it whispers back. But then it’s annoying because you’re like, Oh, no. How do I put it back to normal? Yes. So whispering is not a good way to manage your privacy, but it can be fun to try.
Caroline: Okay, so what are the wake words? Do we think it’s Wakey Wakey? Is it B, Hey, Assistant? Is it C, Alexa, Echo, Amazon, Computer, and Ziggy?
Audience Member: C, C.
Caroline: Will we see if they’re right? Yeah, it’s C. Yeah, so you’ve got a few different options. Sometimes it’s useful to have different names in different rooms because sometimes you find that if they’re all called Alexa and the doors open, then it can set off other devices. So that’s one use case or one example where you might find that you want to change the name. Or if you’re like us and you say the word Alexa a million times a day, then you probably I don’t want your smart speaker to also be called that.
Caroline: Right, so this is probably a little bit unfair in that we didn’t give you any information about this. So I mentioned before that Amazon write this report towards the end of every year that shares trends of what people are asking for. So this is just a bit of fun. So what is the most popular recipe that people asked Alexa for in 2023? So we’ll do a show hands and we’ll go through them one by one. So who thinks it was A, Yorkshire Puddings? No? Oh, we got a couple. Okay, what about B, Pancakes? Got a few more. Okay, okay. And then C, Banana bread. Oh, that one’s quite popular. And then D, Chilli con carne. None? Okay. Go on then. I know. I was shocked by that, too. The list actually is in order. So it’s one, two, three, four. Yorkshire pudding is the most popular, then pancakes, then banana bread, then Chilli con carne. Yes, Yorkshire puddings. And if anyone wants a good Yorkshire pudding recipe, I make really good Yorkshire puddings, don’t I?
Caroline: Oh, you do the next one, sorry. One more question left. See if you were paying attention. What is an Alexa widget? Is it A, a small mechanical gadget that attaches to the speaker? Is it B, a small visual tile on the Alexa screen designed to help you access your favourite features? Or is it C, a game on Alexa where the aim is to solve puzzles and earn widgets.
Audience Member: B.
Caroline: Yes, very good. What will we give them, Eilidh? Did they do okay? Yeah, well done, everyone. Cool. I have one final story to share. And this is actually a story about a little girl I met on a Brownie trip. Just picture this. We’re at the back of the bus. No one’s been sick yet. We’re just sitting, making small talk on the bus. I asked her what her hobbies were. I was kind of expecting that she might say something like gymnastics or reading or playing Minecraft or something like that. Do you know what she said? She said, ralking to Alexa. And literally, I’m like this, What? And I said to her, do you know what I do for a job? I said, I design some of the things that Alexa says. That’s a real job. That’s a real job. And she’s like, Really? I’m like, your hobby could be a real job. And yeah, it was just so funny, and her little face lit up. And so if there’s any of you in the audience who love technology and talk to your smart speaker all the time, I hope that I have inspired you to maybe start to do more with your smart speaker. If there’s something that you think of that you’re like, Oh, I wish that it could do this, maybe one day you could work on building it yourself.
Caroline: I actually did a workshop on Saturday. We did a masterclass workshop idea about conversation design, and I shared some different resources there. This is a rundown of some of the things I shared at the workshop, and then also a little list of different Alexa tutorials, because anyone can build for Alexa. The barrier to entry is very low. They have lots of tutorials. There’s lots of help on there. Thomas is a genius when it comes to all this stuff, and self-taught as well. So it is very accessible. And I think voice interfaces, there’s just so much potential for them. Back in the day when the mouse came out, everyone probably was like, Oh, this is weird. I don’t like it. And we’re still maybe at that stage of, Oh, this is weird. I’m not sure if I like it. But at some point, not too far from now, it will just completely normal for us to talk to computers instead of typing and tapping and clicking and all those things. So yes, thank you so much for being such a wonderful audience. If you want to follow us on social media, we are @TLTecsmart. We also have a website. There’s lots of free guides, and we have a blog and things on there as well. And then I mentioned the book. If you want to grab a copy of the book on the way out, then we do have a couple of copies for sale for £10, or they’re available on Amazon if you scan the QR code.
And because we know that Alexa always likes to have the last word, Alexa, goodbye.
Eilidh: Would you like to hear my cat tune?
Caroline: Oh, go on then.
Eilidh: Meow, meow, meow, meow… [cat notes played on a toy keyboard]
Caroline: Take a bow, my dear. Will we take a bow together. Thank you.
Caroline: It was so much fun putting on this show. I think I slightly underestimated how much work it would be, but I’m so glad to have had the opportunity to share our Alexa knowledge. It was so amazing to share the stage with my daughter Eilidh too. If you’ve listened to this in audio format, you might also want to check out our YouTube channel for the video, where you’ll see our Alexa demo come to life when Eilidh pops out of the smart speaker box for the first time. If you’re looking for the list of resources mentioned, I’ve also popped these in the show notes for you. And of course if you have any Alexa questions, I’d be delighted to help.
Caroline: Thank you for listening all the way to the end, before you go, I have a little favour to ask, so if you’ve liked this episode, screenshot it, tag us on social media @createyourkindspace and maybe share what your key takeaway was from the episode. It would be so wonderful as well if you could rate and review the podcast as this helps other people to find it. Thank you so much.
Disclaimer:
The information on this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. You should seek the advice of an appropriately qualified healthcare professional before making decisions about your own circumstances. You should not disregard, or delay seeking professional medical advice because of any information contained on this podcast.
Unless specifically mentioned on the podcast, Create Your Kindspace and Caroline Laurenson do not formally endorse or have any affiliation with any product or service mentioned in the podcast. The opinions and content provided and/or shared by any third-party guests, any third-party material or third-party website referenced in this podcast does not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Create Your Kindspace and Caroline Laurenson.
