[Beowulf] [External] Re: Lambda and Alexa [EXT]

[Prentice Bisbal]

Unfortunately, I don't see a play button. Not allowed to play in the US?

On 11/25/20 5:51 AM, Jim Cownie wrote:
>> I assumed this was Alexa not understanding a Scottish accent.
> Cue mandatory sketch https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hbfjw 
> <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hbfjw> (may be viewed as NSFW...)
>
>
>   Voice Activated Elevator
>
> Burnistoun is a sketch show that first aired in 2009. Here, Iain 
> Connell and Robert Florence star in a skit about a lift that doesn’t 
> speak Scottish.
>
>
>> On 25 Nov 2020, at 10:41, John Hearns <hearnsj at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:hearnsj at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Aha. I did not know about the 8 second limit. I use Alexa with a 
>> Philips smart lighting hub to control house lights. Sometimes nothing 
>> happens...
>> I assumed this was Alexa not understanding a Scottish accent. I 
>> forgive Alexa now - she might have been having trouble talking to the 
>> Hue.
>>
>> On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 at 10:21, Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk 
>> <mailto:tjrc at sanger.ac.uk>> wrote:
>>
>>     Indeed, my main personal experience with Lambda so far has been
>>     in writing an Alexa skill in my spare time.  It’s been quite fun,
>>     and very instructive in the benefits and pitfalls of lambda.
>>
>>     My main takehomes so far:
>>
>>     1.  I love the fact that there’s basically no code at all other
>>     than that required to deliver the actual skill. Just handler
>>     functions for the incoming requests (Intents, as Amazon call them)
>>
>>     2.  Debugging is awkward.  There is no interactive debugging, as
>>     far as I can tell.   Log inspection is about all you have, and
>>     some errors are obtuse (for example, some valid Node.js
>>     constructs produce syntax errors on Lambda, and it’s very hard to
>>     track down when it happens - unit tests all pass locally but then
>>     you get a syntax error in the LogWatch logs, with a useless stack
>>     trace that doesn’t tell you where the syntax error is). 
>>     Debugging and unit testing on your laptop is hard to do; many
>>     Alexa APIs rely on real hardware functions and the simulators
>>     don’t handle them.
>>
>>     3.  Persistence of data is fairly straightforward using S3
>>     buckets or DynamoDB, and I haven’t noticed latency issues with
>>     those (of course the interactions are on a human timescale, so
>>     latency isn’t really much of an issue)
>>
>>     4.  Interaction with external services can be problematic; Alexa
>>     lambda functions must return within 8 seconds, which can be fun
>>     if your skill needs to fetch data from some other source (in my
>>     case a rather sluggish data service in Azure run by my local
>>     council), and there’s no clean way to handle the event if you hit
>>     the 8 second limit, the function just gets terminated and Alexa
>>     returns a rather meaningless error to the user.
>>
>>     Tim
>>
>>>     On 25 Nov 2020, at 09:45, John Hearns <hearnsj at gmail.com
>>>     <mailto:hearnsj at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     BTW, I am sure everyone knows this but if you have a home
>>>     assistant such as Alexa everytime you ask Alexa it is a lambda
>>>     which is spun up
>>>
>>
>>     -- The Wellcome Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
>>     Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and
>>     a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose
>>     registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
>>
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>
> -- Jim
> James Cownie <jcownie at gmail.com <mailto:jcownie at gmail.com>>
> Mob: +44 780 637 7146
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Prentice Bisbal
Lead Software Engineer
Research Computing
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
http://www.pppl.gov

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