Amazon Echo - Project

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rsbohn
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Re: Amazon Echo - Project

#31

Post by rsbohn »

The Mormon Channel Web Services api allows you to get information about the scriptures, including lists of books in each scripture, with titles and descriptions. You can get a list of chapters in each book (chapters in 3 Nephi for example.) The chapter information (for the Book of Mormon at least) includes a URL for the MP3 audio.

http://tech.lds.org/wiki/Mormon_Channel_Web_Services

This works pretty well with Alexa, but here are a few gotchas:
- Alexa can't handle the lsquo character used in some of the book descriptions (left single quote -- used for apostrophe)
- API book titles are 1 Nephi, 2 Nephi, but for voice it seems better to use "First Nephi", "Second Nephi".
- As mentioned before, Alexa has problems recognising names from the Book of Mormon (gila man for Helaman?)
-- This means that you can't depend on Alexa finding the book by name, you would have better luck navigating from book to book.
- Alexa uses the Spanish pronunciation of Nephi (neffey) but you can get it to say "ˈniːfaɪ".
thattolleyguy
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Re: Amazon Echo - Project

#32

Post by thattolleyguy »

rsbohn wrote:The Mormon Channel Web Services api allows you to get information about the scriptures, including lists of books in each scripture, with titles and descriptions. You can get a list of chapters in each book (chapters in 3 Nephi for example.) The chapter information (for the Book of Mormon at least) includes a URL for the MP3 audio.

http://tech.lds.org/wiki/Mormon_Channel_Web_Services

This works pretty well with Alexa, but here are a few gotchas:
- Alexa can't handle the lsquo character used in some of the book descriptions (left single quote -- used for apostrophe)
- API book titles are 1 Nephi, 2 Nephi, but for voice it seems better to use "First Nephi", "Second Nephi".
- As mentioned before, Alexa has problems recognising names from the Book of Mormon (gila man for Helaman?)
-- This means that you can't depend on Alexa finding the book by name, you would have better luck navigating from book to book.
- Alexa uses the Spanish pronunciation of Nephi (neffey) but you can get it to say "ˈniːfaɪ".
That's great information. Is this a community maintained service or maintained internally? It would be great if we could add in additional fields on the returned data to support Alexa and other voice oriented services. Do you have Alexa code that makes use of it? If so, feel free to pull it in to the project on github.
rsbohn
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Re: Amazon Echo - Project

#33

Post by rsbohn »

It seems to be the official API for The Mormon Channel.

see https://github.com/rsbohn12/GospelLibra ... channel.js
rsbohn
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Re: Amazon Echo - Project

#34

Post by rsbohn »

https://github.com/rsbohn12/GospelLibraryAlexa

I refactored index.js to dispatch intents and added a handler for unhandled intents.
I also added a test script -- it runs the various intents and prints the JSON output if it finds something unexpected.

Perhaps the next step would be to populate the DynamoDB table using information from the Mormon Channel API.
thattolleyguy
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Re: Amazon Echo - Project

#35

Post by thattolleyguy »

rsbohn wrote:https://github.com/rsbohn12/GospelLibraryAlexa

I refactored index.js to dispatch intents and added a handler for unhandled intents.
I also added a test script -- it runs the various intents and prints the JSON output if it finds something unexpected.

Perhaps the next step would be to populate the DynamoDB table using information from the Mormon Channel API.
I pulled those changes in. My meeting with gospel library devs got postponed to this week so right now I'm focusing on trying to add a few things for a demo. I'm adding in the ability to parse conference talk requests and I'm going to add a few sessions to my S3 repo. After that, I'm planning on re-working the utils I've added to pull from the Mormon Channel API instead of scraping lds.org. I'd like to have a single util that pulls from the API to populate the DynamoDB and generate the custom slot values (SCRIPTURE_BOOK, CONFERENCE_SPEAKER, CONFERENCE_TOPIC, etc).
johnjasonfallows
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Re: Amazon Echo - Project

#36

Post by johnjasonfallows »

Great idea. Any news?
thattolleyguy
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Re: Amazon Echo - Project

#37

Post by thattolleyguy »

Met with the gospel library team. Everyone seemed excited about the idea. They were going to look into hosting options and the certificate issue but I haven't heard anything since.
ben2004
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Re: Amazon Echo - Project

#38

Post by ben2004 »

@thattolleyguy I was just wondering if you have made any progress on the project. Did the church approve the licensing?
thattolleyguy
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Re: Amazon Echo - Project

#39

Post by thattolleyguy »

I wish I had something to share but so far I haven't gotten a response. I'll try and email them again tomorrow
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sbradshaw
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Re: Amazon Echo - Project

#40

Post by sbradshaw »

thattolleyguy wrote:I wish I had something to share but so far I haven't gotten a response. I'll try and email them again tomorrow
I'd definitely recommend following up – the development team is kept pretty busy, so it's possible it was set aside and forgotten. Gospel Library 4 is becoming more stable as patch updates are slowing down (i.e. things are less frantic on the development team), so now is probably a good time to follow up.
Samuel Bradshaw • If you desire to serve God, you are called to the work.
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