You Can Now Talk to Alexa Via Slack
Alexa is designed to work with your voice, but sometimes shouting to the virtual assistant isn’t quite perfect. Now you can talk to Alexa and use most of her abilities right from Slack.
This is called SilentEcho . Developed by Bespoken, the bot ( currently in beta ) uses text-to-speech to convert the words you enter into speech. It then uses the Amazon API to send that voicemail to Alexa to get the job done, even with screaming kids, jackhammers, or loud music in the background.
The idea was to create a way for developers who are working on Alexa apps to make it easier to interact with the virtual assistant, but that might be useful for non-developers as well.
My building is currently under construction, so during the day I retire in my noise canceling headphones. Unfortunately, blocking chainsaws means I also block my Echo. Now I can do most of the things I would do with my Echo during the day without yelling at the construction equipment.
Quiet echo doesn’t work for everyone. For security reasons, the app doesn’t allow you to do anything with a billing account, so you won’t be able to order Dominos or a box of toilet paper from Amazon. However, you can do things like turn on the lights in your house, add something to a playlist, or ask for weather information. The shared Silent Echo account (tied to an Amazon super-limited account) can also be used in group chat channels.
To enable the bot, you need to be an administrator for your Slack account. If you’re an app developer on a small team, it shouldn’t be too difficult, but for those in larger companies, convincing the boss to sign up can be tricky.
This is certainly not something that you will use all the time (sometimes even searching the Internet will be easier than doing it), but sometimes it can definitely come in handy.
A Twitter version is expected to be available soon, which could be even more useful.