adrianbg

It should be working in the UK now.

It should be working now.

Should be working now.

Only that that's all I've had time to do so far. What alternative did you have in mind?

Thanks for trying it. I don't see any errors from today on my end. Would you mind emailing me at [email protected] to debug?

India, Canada, the UK, and other English-speaking countries are in Amazon's review process. Should be working in another day or two.

I ranted about this in the unofficial Alexa Slack team and the people there gave some plausible (but unsatisfying) reasons why it works like that. I'm not a huge fan of Amazon though, so I'm happy to blame them. Essentially it boils down to different regions being treated as different "languages" as well as having features rolled out to them at different rates.

Made a new version and submitted it for review. If all goes well, it should be working in a day or two. Let me know how it goes.

I.... don't know. But I doubt it :)

Oh man, def not intentional. I'm Canadian too.

Hmm sorry. Where abouts are you? I didn't intentionally put on any restrictions.

Google's speech recognition is supposed to be much better, though not sure if they'd allow "one intent to rule them all" like you want.

For free-form speech recognition in Alexa, the best option I've seen mentioned on the public Alexa Slack team is using the "SearchQuery" slot. So you'd still have to make a weird catch-all intent that would eat up some of the words (and you wouldn't be able to see them). At the same time, you shouldn't assume that Alexa will give you very good results with such loose constraints. Even in my simple skill it's very bad about confusing certain pairs of words.

I find Amazon's products often have bizarre constraints like that. They seem to do well anyway though :/

Thanks for your comments! I wonder if I can create some kind of personalized briefing based on which stories people seem interested in.

My guess would be that they have separate speech recognition / synthesis models. Sorry, I should try and get this thing out to other countries too.

Yeah, I don't think it's intended to be interactive. More like a really quick curated news update.