Alexa Read Medium Stories

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  Icon of the app displayed on the Alexa store

Inspiration

I scour Medium a lot and there's a lot of times when I am free, but not able to hold an article up to my face, so why not make Alexa read an article for you.

What it does

It takes the top stories on the main page of Medium and lists you 3 of it's searches. Alexa will read you the articles' titles and you get to decide which of the three you want to listen to: first, second or third.

How I built it

I used all the basic requirements for making an Alexa app: Alexa skills kit, AWS, nodejs, and Lambda. With nodejs, instead of importing a library to scour the html, I parsed it by myself.

Challenges I ran into

The limitations of Alexa max character count of 8000 and what it can read hit me hard. Certain characters are not allowed on Alexa and the rules are not obvious on the documentations. Also I was going to split the responses so I hack my way through the max character count, but it looks like there's also a restriction on that too. I couldn't really find anything that allowed me to queue up responses.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The app is done and I'm proud to say, though Alexa developer skills kit still needs work, it's quite nice. I'm happy that it can take in the medium article and read it out for the user.

What I learned

Alexa and Lamda rules.

What's next for Alexa Read Medium Articles

I was planning to make it also take in url's so Alexa sounds out the audio because I know it's capable of that. Right now, I want to see if people would even use this for just reading the article itself.

Built With

• alexa-skill
• amazon-alexa
• amazon-web-services
• lambda
• node.js