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...

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...