Amazon Echo - Project

[russellhltn]

I met with some church representatives on Friday to demo what a Gospel Library skill would look like.

Congratulations! That's a hurtle that many seem to be unable to figure out how to approach, much less get over. That's quite an accomplishment.

I assume it was a outgrowth if your attempts at licensing the content?

[thattolleyguy]

Thanks! One of the things they mentioned is that it doesn't happen very often, though they are trying to make changes to allow more projects through. I think the biggest thing is that it was hard for them to figure out what Gospel Library on the Echo meant without seeing it. I guess we'll see if it goes any further. It wouldn't surprise me if they got a bunch of licensing requests from other people interested in doing something similar. Maybe I'm just the lucky one who got to present it. If so, I hope I did a good job!

[russellhltn]

Gospel Library on the Echo

I would have loved to been there while it was demoed.

I think one thing going for it is that it sounds like it was billed as an existing program being extended to a new device. Much simpler administratively then a whole new concept.

The fact it doesn't use any PII makes it much easier to get approval. I think most things people are wanting to do involve church membership data - something which must give the security people the heebie-jeebies.

[thattolleyguy]

I would have loved to been there while it was demoed.

It was pretty awesome. I hate to get my hopes up too high, but there was a general feeling of excitement when you heard the scriptures streaming out of the device. I guess we'll just wait and see...

[steckdev]

Please let us know what come of it. I would love to get involved and contribute to the success of the project. However we need a reliable HTTPS RestAPI that they can add content and we can access. Once we have that we can develop the code and they can oversee the Project Management and QA of the project. I hope that we can get some movement behind this. I have thought about creating my own content hosting service just to cast up their media because I can't access them through https. But because of the restrictions on media I haven't done this yet...

My list of what I want to get working
More reliable Rest API for text-speech scripture verse reader
Stream audio for listening to the chapters professionally recorded
General Conference talks searchable by Speaker and Topic
BYU Speeches searchable by Speaker and Topics.
Get Preach my Gospel, Howard W Hunter, ARP Guide, and several other books audio streaming

[thattolleyguy]

More reliable Rest API for text-speech scripture verse reader

One thing I heard mentioned in the meeting is professionally recorded audio by verse. It was a pretty quick reference so I may have misunderstood, but that would mean not need to use text-to-speech. That would be great for long verses (D&C, JS-H) that might be longer than the length limit Alexa has for TTS.

General Conference talks searchable by Speaker and Topic

A concern I have is Alexa's ability to recognize names for searching for conference talks. If anyone wants to try to work on a proof of concept of mapping requests to speaker names, that might be really beneficial. That could be pretty tricky. For example when I was trying to get the Book of Mormon book names mapping correctly, Helaman would sometimes be passed in as "gila man".

[russellhltn]

I think how quickly it goes forth may depend on if the project needs access to the LDS Account. If you can do it initially without bookmarks and stuff, I think it would be much easier to get off the ground. I wouldn't want to hold up the whole project for the approvals needed for the account.

[thattolleyguy]

I think how quickly it goes forth may depend on if the project needs access to the LDS Account. If you can do it initially without bookmarks and stuff, I think it would be much easier to get off the ground. I wouldn't want to hold up the whole project for the approvals needed for the account.

Good point. I hadn't talked about doing any of that off the bat so I don't think it will hold the project up. I'm not even sure it's a good feature given the voice interface. I think the biggest question is whether the church is willing to pay the costs of hosting the code to run the skill. If they do approach the project similar to the way the mobile apps are done, this would be a major difference and add to the cost. Another potential hinderance may be the niche market of the Echo and Alexa devices. They may instead try and use resources adding voice support to android and iOS apps.

[russellhltn]

Another potential hinderance may be the niche market of the Echo and Alexa devices. They may instead try and use resources adding voice support to android and iOS apps.

And let's not forget Google Home. Echo/Dot/Alexa has a good head start, but there's an excellent chance that Home will be right up there with them. So the question is, does the church want to go down that alleyway?

[steckdev]

The architecture that needs to be designed is an open source Rest API that would enable any developer to request scriptures, conference talks, or other pieces of information. With this designed as a defined Rest API then any other device that will/can come along can use this architecture without them having to evaluate and encourage the open-source community that thrives in this type of project. I want to contribute and make a difference but we just don't have an ability to access the information.