CBC Podcasts

Heads up: This is great example, but...

Alexa targets can only accept HTTPS streams. The CBC, and most podcasters, serve their stuff over HTTP because why waste the cycles on encrypting public audio streams? That being said, it does work. Alexa can use the skill to let the user ask for a particular podcast. The listing API will parse a podcast RSS feed given its title, and return the item list as JSON. Finally, Alexa will take that list, grab the first episode (seems to always be latest, coming from the CBC at least) and play it.

The rest of the old README

There are two AWS Lambda functions here: a Python function that finds and reads the CBC podcast RSS feeds, the other is a NodeJS-based podcast player skill for Alexa based on the sample Alexa audio player project.

Deployment

Uses Gordon to take care of all the heavy lifting. Deployment should work out of the box using gordon build && gordon apply.

One bit of snowflaking needs to happen first though, since gordon doesn't support the Alexa Skills Kit yet. The template in cloudformation/ will fix that. It takes one parameter: the generated Lambda function name for the Player.

Something funky with the ASK: DynamoDB CreateTable() permissions will be refused unless the function is called from an actual/simulated Alexa device hooked up to an Amazon account. The test function in Lambda itself stops being useful once you start getting responses like the one below.

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "response": {
    "outputSpeech": {
      "type": "SSML",
      "ssml": "<speak> Sorry, this skill is not supported on this device </speak>"
    },
    "shouldEndSession": true
  },
  "sessionAttributes": {}
}

Built With

• html
• javascript
• python