Consumer devices are becoming increasingly “smart”, helping people automate common tasks and increasing the convenience in which they acquire information and services. The Department of Commerce is excited to be the first government agency to support the development of voice recognition tools through Amazon Alexa Skills Kit with the goal of improving access to data.
On October 7th-8th, the “Alexa Skills Open Data Challenge” will be held at Amazon headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Software developers and civic hackers will have the chance to make build innovative solutions that connect open data with voice recognition.
By participating in the “Alexa Skills Open Data Challenge”, the Department of Commerce will provide its vast offering of open data to participants. In addition, technical assistance at the event will be provided by US Department of Commerce’s digital services shop, known as the Commerce Data Service, along with supporting bureaus like the US Census Bureau. Example scenarios than can be created with Commerce data include:
- Agriculture: Understand weather forecasts to better plan harvest (source: National Weather Service / National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
- Recreation: Understand tide and marine conditions to plan surfing and fishing outings (source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
- Innovation: Determine which cities are generated the most patents (source: US Patent and Trademark Office)
- Demographic and Economic information: Ask questions related to US population, median income, and more (source: US Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis)
It's free! Sign up at developer.amazon.com.
Free, but will require a credit card. Do it at aws.amazon.com/register.
An SDK and example code for building voice-enabled skills for the Amazon Echo are available at github.com/amzn/alexa-skills-kit-js.