Two Voice Devs

Allen thinks that the Interactive Canvas feature on the Google Assistant is one of the best technologies it supports, but Mark has a few questions about how it works. Supporting most of your favorite HTML/CSS/JS technologies in a Chrome-like environment, how would you enhance your Actions? What questions do you have about using it?

Breaks are good times to get some coding done, so what have Allen and Mark been up to recently? Turns out, there are some updates with Speech Markdown and Multivocal, and they explore these changes and the code that went into them.   Speech Markdown: speechmarkdown.org  Multivocal: multivocal.info

Happy New Year! At least we hope it is. Mark and Allen take a glimpse at the year ahead and discuss what we hope the new year will look like for voice first developers. (Without getting TOO absurd!)

With 2020 finally coming to a close, Allen and Mark look back at the past year - both personally and professionally.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone! Mark was busy working on his new game, Snatch Words, and Allen provided some help getting it working with the Google Assistant. Hear what that means when it comes to visual lists, security tokens, and more.

Have you played Snatch Word or Cross Talk yet? Mark and Allen chat about what it's taken to get their recent games developed and a bit about the underlying technology and code.

Mark is getting ready to release his new game, Snatch Word, but there are a couple of details to work out. So he and Allen chat about what it's taking to get things ready for release.

We often talk about skills and actions being "all about the content", but how do we manage that content if its so important? In a content management system, of course! Mark and Allen discuss their experiences using CMS tools and the crucial role they play in building practical skills and actions.

In the US, today is Thanksgiving. Allen and Mark would like to thank all of you for watching and listening, but also some people who have meant so much to us.   Just a small list includes:  Our families and closest friends Michael Palermo  Brad Abrams, Jessica Early-Cha, and Mandy Chan  Bradley Metrock  Octavio Menocal  Gene Homicki, my coworkers, and everyone at MyTu...

Building for voice is more than writing a simple program and you're done. A good voice skill or action has many components that work together. Mark and Allen discuss what some of those components are, how they integrate, and what you should think about as you write them.   Number Spies System Components: https://markvoicedev.medium.com/creating-an-alexa-game-number-spies-system-components-ove...

Even before you start with a blank editor, you're faced with coming up with the idea. When it comes to Voice - what inspires us? Allen and Mark talk about where our ideas come from and how they start to shape our #VoiceFirst experiences.   Mark writes about what inspired him to create Number Spies: https://markvoicedev.medium.com/creating-an-alexa-game-the-spark-of-inspiration-for-number-spie...

With all the confusion about Daylight Saving Time transitions finally behind us, Mark and Allen discuss all sorts of ways to handle time on Alexa, the Google Assistant, and Bixby. (And some tools and tips that make it easier!)

Where we are now has been shaped by our past. In light of this, Allen and Mark discuss how we got to this moment. What technologies and jobs have we held in our careers, and what lessons have they taught us that have helped us when it comes to voice.

Mark and Allen discuss the tools they use to build Skills and Actions, and some of the tricks to make a developer's life a little easier and more productive.

What happens when new features are released? Why, Mark and Allen break into song! And discuss the latest new features developers for Alexa and Google Assistant can work with .

Google Assistant Console: https://console.actions.google.com/ Main docs page: https://developers.google.com/assistant Codelabs: https://developers.google.com/assistant/conversational/codelabs Community forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleAssistantDev/ Stack Overflow: actions-on-google and actions-builder tags twitter: @ActionsOnGoogle Actions on Air video / podcast series Follow other GDEs - man...

For our milestone episode we wanted to change it up a little. So we present our Top Ten issues that we see with the major platforms as developers.

We have something special planned for our 10th episode! Curious what it might be?

Authentication and Authorization are some of the more difficult concepts that most developers end up having to deal with at some stage. Mark and Allen discuss the high level concept of Account Linking - connecting your auth system to the voice agents auth system. Alexa and Google Assistant offer some tools to help with this, and explore how some of the tools are similar, but others offer significa...

As developers, the more information we can get about people talking with our skills or actions, the better the conversation will be. But privacy is a serious issue! (And one the platforms take seriously, too.) How does Alexa and the Google Assistant balance our need for more information, and the need for privacy? And how can we ask for permission to get the information? There are surprising differ...

We never know where our conversations go, sometimes. This time, Mark and Allen chat about Intents, Slots, Types, Entities, Parameters, and the whole conversational model built around them, especially the slight differences between how Actions and Skills have to treat them.

Just because our skills and actions are Voice First doesn't mean they are voice Only. Alexa and the Google Assistant have a long history of supporting displays in addition to the audio interactions. Mark and Allen dive into all the visual options available for Alexa, Assistant, and Bixby and the interesting differences between the three platforms.

Did you notice some Actions were having problems last week? Allen and Mark certainly did! So this week, we're talking about what seems to have caused the outage, how this fits in to the overall storage capability for Actions, and how Alexa and Jovo approach session and user storage.

In an audio-first environment, you want to sound like a movie or TV soundtrack... but with interaction and dynamic responses. With Google's flavor of SSML and Alexa's APLA, you can create these responses. Mark and Allen explore how these two methods are similar, and where they differ.   For more info:  Google's SSML "par" and "media" tags: https://developers.google.com/assistant/conversa...

We both have open source projects that we contribute to in the voice community. We talk about our two top ones, Speech Markdown and Multivocal, what they are, and how we feel they're contributing to the growing #VoiceFirst environment.   Learn more:  Mark's Projects: https://github.com/rmtuckerphx http://ssml.guru/ https://www.speechmarkdown.org/  Allen's Projects: https://github.co...