IMHO, the Alexa skills store is mostly a way for Amazon have other companies do their product research for them, before they build the features into the platform themselves.
There are lots of apps that connect to established third parties that Amazon is likely not to build, e.g., home automation with SmartThings, music with Pandora. And also several silly but fun things that they may not wish to maintain, e.g., jeopardy game or the fart app.
But yeah, I don't blame you for being cautious of their intentions. Developers have been burned in the past on these big platforms (e.g., Twitter [1]), but I have hope that they will realize the pie is bigger if they make their platform attractive to 3rd party devs.
Pandora integration is in the latest Echo versions -- just connect your account via the Alexa app and ask "play my station on pandora".
I read through their SDK, and music playback isn't really supported. You can do clips up to 90 seconds, but they have to be encoded at 48kHz and at a certain bitrate.
If you're interested in the genre, "Hunt the Yeti" is a new adventure game that was released a few days ago and seems to be well received based on the reviews (I have not yet played it).
I hope they don't all end up being locked into the Echo platform - there's no reason such games couldn't work just as well on a smartphone. Although I suppose Amazon's platform may boost a better and easier-to-use speech recognition engine.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 14.4 ms ] threadBut yeah, I don't blame you for being cautious of their intentions. Developers have been burned in the past on these big platforms (e.g., Twitter [1]), but I have hope that they will realize the pie is bigger if they make their platform attractive to 3rd party devs.
[1] http://nordicapis.com/twitter-10-year-struggle-with-develope...
I read through their SDK, and music playback isn't really supported. You can do clips up to 90 seconds, but they have to be encoded at 48kHz and at a certain bitrate.
https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/05/amazon-echo-audio-advent...
I wonder to what extent it would work to create high quality narrated Infocom style adventure games.
The logical narrator for everything of course being Stephen Fry.
If you're interested in the genre, "Hunt the Yeti" is a new adventure game that was released a few days ago and seems to be well received based on the reviews (I have not yet played it).
https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/4x2jfc/introduc...