Alexa is a virtual personal assistant from Amazon. Similar in spirit to offerings from Apple (Siri), Microsoft (Cortana) and Google (Assistant), you can speak to these personal assistants and ask them to read the weather report, play a song or tell you a joke. What truly sets Amazon's Alexa apart from the other personal assistants, however, is that it provides an API that programmers (like us) can use to define new skills for Alexa — teaching it new tricks. As a demonstration, Finite Wisdom has developed a new skill for Alexa that allows it to connect to Harvest, the time tracking application that we use to track the number of hours we bill each day to each of our clients. With this new skill in place, one of our clients can have a conversation like the following with Alexa...
Read moreDEMO: Alexa, ask Finite Wisdom (Take 1)
Alexa is a virtual personal assistant from Amazon. Similar in spirit to offerings from Apple (Siri), Microsoft (Cortana) and Google (Assistant), you can speak to these personal assistants and ask them to read the weather report, play a song or tell you a joke. What truly sets Amazon's Alexa apart from the other personal assistants, however, is that it provides an API that programmers (like us) can use to define new skills for Alexa — teaching it new tricks. As a demonstration, Finite Wisdom has developed a new skill for Alexa that allows it to connect to Harvest, the time tracking application that we use to track the number of hours we bill each day to each of our clients. With this new skill in place, one of our clients can have a conversation like the following with Alexa...
Read moreWorldwide, yes, but most importantly a Web
When the worldwide web was first created in the 1980s, its "web" nature was limited to linking documents together. Today, the web has evolved to link data together also. If one website has data to share, it provides an API, or application programming interface that another website can use to retrieve the shared data. For example, Harvest is a time tracking application used by over 40,000 companies including Finite Wisdom. We use it to track the number of hours we bill each day to each of our clients. Harvest provides an API that one can use to retrieve this information and present it on your own website or web application. To demonstrate an integration with the Harvest API, we have created a small demo application that one can use to summarize the hours that two of us here at Finite Wisdom have billed to each of our clients.
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