Checking The Weather Prediction Is As Easy As Asking Alexa
Germany’s leading weather forecasting website wetter.com has introduced a new means of weather inquiry for its customers. Wetter.com wanted to build an Alexa skill that makes it easy and swift for users to catch their weekly and daily forecasts.
Traditionally Wetter.com was providing inclusive weather reports to customers via its app, website, and television. Severin Orth, Full Stack Developer at Wetter.com, recognized the possibility of voice technology utilization for customer interaction.
Orth said, “I’m very interested in new technology and seeing how people were using Alexa in America, I knew this was something we needed to experiment with,” “At the time, Alexa wasn’t available in Germany, but because a voice solution aligned so well with our business goals and the other services we provide, we started imagining what eventually became our skill for Alexa.”
Orth and team developed a working prototype, after setting the goal to provide people weather information as per their needs and in the most convenient way.
Orth expressed, “The Alexa Skills Kit has great documentation, and building the skill was very easy.”
The skill works like, “Alexa, ask Wetter.com for the weather today in Berlin,” and Alexa gives the latest forecast during the day for that particular location.
The skill utilizes an API to gather the data to send voice responses for inquiries into weather reports.
Wetter.com hosts its skill on AWS Lambda and it also acts as a bridge between its backend and Alexa.
Moreover, for warning delivery Wetter.com uses Amazon’s API Gateway as a proxy for two Lambda functions, Amazon CloudWatch for login monitoring, Amazon DynamoDB for delivering and storing weather warnings.
Orth also praised Amazon, “Since Alexa wasn’t available in Germany when we were developing the Amazon Alexa skill, the Amazon team was incredibly helpful at assisting us in getting the skill live and providing feedback along the way.”
In addition, Wetter.com introduced a new notifications feature that uses users’ locations to send notifications along with weather notices from the German Weather Service.
With this feature customers can also ask, “Alexa, read my notifications,” or “Alexa, what did I miss?”
Wetter.com also plans to improve their skill to comprise features like a card response.
While talking about their next step Orth said, “Our next round of development will include information on pollen counts. So, if a user is allergic to trees or flowers, he or she can simply ask Alexa for their Wetter.com daily pollen flash briefing and know what places to avoid during certain times of the day.”
“Developing this skill has really got us thinking about how we can improve our other services with voice,” “My biggest advice for developers is to just get started. Build a basic skill, test it, and improve along the way.” Orth Said.
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Conclusion
The world is embracing this amazing technology, Alexa Skills and implementing it in more innovative approaches so as to bring convenience to almost every aspect of everyday life.
If you want to see how much Alexa voice service impacts your business operations or processes then you can also visualize Alexa skills integration in your business functionality like apps, so as to lead ahead in the technology era. Contact us to create Alexa Skills as per your needs.
FAQs About Alexa and Wetter.com Integration
You can get a weather forecast from this website on your Amazon Echo smart device by following simple steps. First, you need to enable “Wetter.com” in the Alexa app, and then you can use commands like “Alexa, open wetter.com”, “Alexa, what is today’s weather?”, and much more, and it uses geolocation to provide data as per the city mentioned.
Establishing a robust weather skill in Alexa, like wetter.com, basically relies on a serverless architecture using some of the popular AWS services like AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway System, Amazon DynamoDB & proactive APIs.
This is a shorter, pre-recorded, or text-to-speech update that users generally hear like “Alexa, what is today’s news?” Wetter.com mainly adds this skillset to flash briefing to receive a personalised weather recommendation that plays in an automatic manner along with traffic news & updates, giving a hands-free great experience.
This is basically done by leveraging the Proactive Events API system. So, when the weather service like Wetter.com sends an alert or notification to the users of Alexa, there is a yellow ring light, and then users can ask for “Alexa, what are my notifications on weather?”, which results in outcomes of the alerts.
The primary challenge is the information density, as a mobile app shows a seven-day forecast report, wind speeds, and others on a screen, a smarter voice assistant should be much more concise to avoid overload conditions.
Article By
Mayur Panchal is the CTO of Excellent Webworld. With his skills and expertise, He stays updated with industry trends and utilizes his technical expertise to address problems faced by entrepreneurs and startup owners.
