[adrianbg]

Alexa does most of the hard stuff: speech recognition / intent detection, and speech synthesis.

My back end is a simple Python service on GCP that handles HTTP requests from Alexa. The same service also downloads the HN front page from the FireBase mirror and gets summaries from this API:

https://rapidapi.com/textanalysis/api/Text%20Summarization

It's not perfect though, so I may switch to a more expensive summarization API, supplement it with manual summaries, and/or train my own summarization model.

[serg_chernata]

Thank you, I didn't know Alexa handled all of that.

[adrianbg]

Sometimes I wish it didn't. They don't give you the original audio, any kind of confidence score, or even alternative hypotheses. It's really a pretty rigid platform. A lot of things that seem like they should be reasonable are impossible. Eg., I'd prefer to just say a list of post titles and let people interrupt Alexa when they hear something they like. That is impossible right now without pretty serious hacks.