Amazon is hosting its Alexa Live 2022 conference for developers building skills, which are sort of like applications, for Alexa-powered smart home devices. According to Amazon, there are hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices in use, and building skills for Alexa provides developers with a good opportunity to engage with those customers in new ways. … continue reading
Amazon has announced a developer preview for Alexa-hosted skills. Alexa-hosted skills allows developers to build, edit, and publish skills within the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) Developer Console. Previously, developers needed to provision and manage back-end resources. By staying within the console, developers can quickly build skills and spend their time more on creating new features … continue reading
Amazon is giving Alexa developers a chance to make money with the announcement of new forms of monetization. According to the company, this would help bring new, engaging and high quality experiences in front of customers while providing developers with ways to earn money for their skills. First, developers can start making money by selling … continue reading
Amazon had announced the addition of memory capabilities to its artificial intelligence, Alexa. It can remember any information for you so that you will not forget. The company also plans to add deep learning models to the spoken language understanding of Alexa. “We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible,” said Ruhi Sarikaya … continue reading
Gender diversity has long been a problem in the technology space, but a newly released report finds the industry is finally making strides to address this. HackerRank’s Women in Tech report found that women make up 53 percent of the graduates and junior developers entering the workforce. This is the highest number to date, according … continue reading
Google’s horizontally scalable, strongly consistent relational database service, Cloud Spanner, is now production ready. The company first introduced the solution in February of this year. Cloud Spanner is designed for mission-critical OLTP applications and enterprise databases. “Cloud Spanner also offers additional accuracy, reliability and performance in the form of a fully-managed cloud database service. Thanks … continue reading
The open-source distributed version control system Git has reached version 2.13. The latest release includes features and bug fixes, as well as a brief security announcement. According to the Git team, version 2.13 fixes a git shell program vulnerability for those running their own Git hosting server. The release also includes SHA-1 collision detection to … continue reading
Oracle has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the continuous integration platform provider Wercker. Wercker enables organizations and development teams to reach CI and continuous delivery goals with microservices and Docker with its container-centric and cloud-native automation platform. According to Oracle, with Wercker the company can continue its mission of democratizing developer tooling for … continue reading
In order to make Alexa more useful and engaging, Amazon introduced two new development features: a Device Address API and a new metrics dashboard. Both the Device Address API and the new metrics dashboard allows developers to build new Alexa skills with deeper insights. As of February this year, there are 10,000 skills available on … continue reading
RethinkDB, an open-source database for real-time web functionality, is shutting down despite all efforts to turn it into a database technology business. Slava Akhmechet, founder of RethinkDB, wrote that the members of the RethinkDB community are developing a continuity plan for RethinkDB and Horizon. Both projects will still be available and distributed under open-source licenses. … continue reading
Amazon is hosting its annual competition for university students who are passionate about accelerating the field of artificial intelligence. The challenge this year is focused on developing a social bot, which Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant can use to communicate with humans on popular topics or events. For this challenge, teams will have to work in … continue reading
Altova announced this morning new pricing and functionality for MobileTogether 2.1, a framework for building and deploying native mobile apps. Version 2.1 introduced more than 20 features based on developer feedback, from functionality for building tables, to error-handling actions, and also flexible options for UI design. With MobileTogether 2.1, the app development environment is free … continue reading
