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Build Talking Apps for Alexa

Author : Craig Walls

Publisher : Pragmatic Bookshelf

Page : 498 pages

File Size : 16,75 MB

Release : 2022-04-25

Category : Computers

ISBN : 1680509861

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Book Description

Voice recognition is here at last. Alexa and other voice assistants have now become widespread and mainstream. Is your app ready for voice interaction? Learn how to develop your own voice applications for Amazon Alexa. Start with techniques for building conversational user interfaces and dialog management. Integrate with existing applications and visual interfaces to complement voice-first applications. The future of human-computer interaction is voice, and we'll help you get ready for it. For decades, voice-enabled computers have only existed in the realm of science fiction. But now the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) lets you develop your own voice-first applications. Leverage ASK to create engaging and natural user interfaces for your applications, enabling them to listen to users and talk back. You'll see how to use voice and sound as first-class components of user-interface design. We'll start with the essentials of building Alexa voice applications, called skills, including useful tools for creating, testing, and deploying your skills. From there, you can define parameters and dialogs that will prompt users for input in a natural, conversational style. Integrate your Alexa skills with Amazon services and other backend services to create a custom user experience. Discover how to tailor Alexa's voice and language to create more engaging responses and speak in the user's own language. Complement the voice-first experience with visual interfaces for users on screen-based devices. Add options for users to buy upgrades or other products from your application. Once all the pieces are in place, learn how to publish your Alexa skill for everyone to use. Create the future of user interfaces using the Alexa Skills Kit today. What You Need: You will need a computer capable of running the latest version of Node.js, a Git client, and internet access.



Build Talking Apps for Alexa

Author : Craig Walls

Publisher : Pragmatic Bookshelf

Page : 498 pages

File Size : 49,36 MB

Release : 2022-04-25

Category : Computers

ISBN : 1680509861

Get eBook

Book Description

Voice recognition is here at last. Alexa and other voice assistants have now become widespread and mainstream. Is your app ready for voice interaction? Learn how to develop your own voice applications for Amazon Alexa. Start with techniques for building conversational user interfaces and dialog management. Integrate with existing applications and visual interfaces to complement voice-first applications. The future of human-computer interaction is voice, and we'll help you get ready for it. For decades, voice-enabled computers have only existed in the realm of science fiction. But now the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) lets you develop your own voice-first applications. Leverage ASK to create engaging and natural user interfaces for your applications, enabling them to listen to users and talk back. You'll see how to use voice and sound as first-class components of user-interface design. We'll start with the essentials of building Alexa voice applications, called skills, including useful tools for creating, testing, and deploying your skills. From there, you can define parameters and dialogs that will prompt users for input in a natural, conversational style. Integrate your Alexa skills with Amazon services and other backend services to create a custom user experience. Discover how to tailor Alexa's voice and language to create more engaging responses and speak in the user's own language. Complement the voice-first experience with visual interfaces for users on screen-based devices. Add options for users to buy upgrades or other products from your application. Once all the pieces are in place, learn how to publish your Alexa skill for everyone to use. Create the future of user interfaces using the Alexa Skills Kit today. What You Need: You will need a computer capable of running the latest version of Node.js, a Git client, and internet access.



Creating Software with Modern Diagramming Techniques

Author : Ashley Peacock

Publisher : Pragmatic Bookshelf

Page : 234 pages

File Size : 15,40 MB

Release : 2023-02-08

Category : Computers

ISBN :

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Book Description

Diagrams communicate relationships more directly and clearly than words ever can. Using only text-based markup, create meaningful and attractive diagrams to document your domain, visualize user flows, reveal system architecture at any desired level, or refactor your code. With the tools and techniques this book will give you, you'll create a wide variety of diagrams in minutes, share them with others, and revise and update them immediately on the basis of feedback. Adding diagrams to your professional vocabulary will enable you to work through your ideas quickly when working on your own code or discussing a proposal with colleagues. Expand your professional vocabulary by learning to communicate with diagrams as easily and naturally as speaking or writing. This book will provide you with the skills and tools to turn ideas into clear, meaningful, and attractive diagrams in mere minutes, using nothing more complicated than text-based markup. You'll learn what kinds of diagrams are suited to each of a variety of use cases, from documenting your domain to understanding how complex code pieces together. Model your software's architecture, creating diagrams focused broadly or narrowly, depending on the audience. Visualize application and user flows, design database schemas, and use diagrams iteratively to design and refactor your application. You'll be able to use technical diagramming to improve your day-to-day workflow. You will better understand the codebase you work in, communicate ideas more effectively and immediately with others, and more clearly document the architecture with C4 diagrams. Manually creating diagrams is cumbersome and time-consuming. You'll learn how to use text-based tools like Mermaid to rapidly turn ideas into diagrams. And You'll learn how to keep your diagrams up to date and seamlessly integrated into your engineering workflow. You'll be better at visualizing and communicating when you add diagrams to your standard vocabulary. What You Need: A Mac or PC A GitHub account



Automate Your Home Using Go

Author : Ricardo Gerardi

Publisher : Pragmatic Bookshelf

Page : 209 pages

File Size : 47,85 MB

Release : 2024-08-19

Category : Computers

ISBN :

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Book Description

Take control of your home and your data with the power of the Go programming language. Build extraordinary and robust home automation solutions that rival much more expensive, closed commercial alternatives, using the same tools found in high-end enterprise computing environments. Best-selling Pragmatic Bookshelf authors Ricardo Gerardi and Mike Riley show how you can use inexpensive Raspberry Pi hardware and excellent, open source Go-based software tools like Prometheus and Grafana to create your own personal data center. Using the step-by-step examples in the book, build useful home automation projects that you can use as a blueprint for your own custom projects. With just a Raspberry Pi and the Go programming language, build your own personal data center that coordinates and manages your home automation, leveraging the same high-powered software used by large enterprises. The projects in this book are easy to assemble, no soldering or electrical engineering expertise required. Build a temperature monitor that can send alerts any time defined thresholds are exceeded and report the temperature readings on a time-based series chart. Change the color of lights to visually indicate the current outdoor weather status. Create a networked motion detector that triggers an alert any time motion is detected, such as a door opening or closing, a pet wandering around, or deliveries or visitors arriving on your front porch. Even have these triggers initiate a more complex Go-based automation sequence. Integrate a small, high-resolution camera into a bird feeder that takes excellent, up-close photos whenever a bird perches at the feeder, and broadcasts them to your Discord server where your family and friends can see these wildlife captures in real time. Control your home with hardware you configure, and manage it with Go code that you create and modify any time you want to enhance your home automation capabilities. What You Need: Readers should be familiar with the Go programming language and have working knowledge of Linux. Free, open source Go-based libraries and utilities are available for download from the Internet. Readers will also need a working Raspberry Pi 3+ or higher, and a Pi Pico W microcontroller. Several other inexpensive electronic parts (touch sensors, motion detectors) are also needed for some of the projects. A Philips Hue base lighting system is also needed for the weather monitor project.



Exploring Graphs with Elixir

Author : Tony Hammond

Publisher : Pragmatic Bookshelf

Page : 393 pages

File Size : 28,98 MB

Release : 2022-11-02

Category : Computers

ISBN :

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Book Description

Data is everywhere - it's just not very well connected, which makes it super hard to relate dataset to dataset. Using graphs as the underlying glue, you can readily join data together and create navigation paths across diverse sets of data. Add Elixir, with its awesome power of concurrency, and you'll soon be mastering data networks. Learn how different graph models can be accessed and used from within Elixir and how you can build a robust semantics overlay on top of graph data structures. We'll start from the basics and examine the main graph paradigms. Get ready to embrace the world of connected data! Graphs provide an intuitive and highly flexible means for organizing and querying huge amounts of loosely coupled data items. These data networks, or graphs in math speak, are typically stored and queried using graph databases. Elixir, with its noted support for fault tolerance and concurrency, stands out as a language eminently suited to processing sparsely connected and distributed datasets. Using Elixir and graph-aware packages in the Elixir ecosystem, you'll easily be able to fit your data to graphs and networks, and gain new information insights. Build a testbed app for comparing native graph data with external graph databases. Develop a set of applications under a single umbrella app to drill down into graph structures. Build graph models in Elixir, and query graph databases of various stripes - using Cypher and Gremlin with property graphs and SPARQL with RDF graphs. Transform data from one graph modeling regime to another. Understand why property graphs are especially good at graph traversal problems, while RDF graphs shine at integrating different semantic models and can scale up to web proportions. Harness the outstanding power of concurrent processing in Elixir to work with distributed graph datasets and manage data at scale. What You Need: To follow along with the book, you should have Elixir 1.10+ installed. The book will guide you through setting up an umbrella application for a graph testbed using a variety of graph databases for which Java SDK 8+ is generally required. Instructions for installing the graph databases are given in an appendix.



Voice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant

Author : Dustin Coates

Publisher : Simon and Schuster

Page : 362 pages

File Size : 18,56 MB

Release : 2019-07-04

Category : Computers

ISBN : 1638350000

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Book Description

Summary Voice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant is your guide to designing, building, and implementing voice-based applications for Alexa and Google Assistant. Inside, you'll learn how to build your own "skills"—the voice app term for actions the device can perform—from scratch. Foreword by Max Amordeluso. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. You'll find registration instructions inside the print book. About the Technology In 2018, an estimated 100 million voice-controlled devices were installed in homes worldwide, and the apps that control them, like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, are getting more powerful, with new skills being added every day. Great voice apps improve how users interact with the web, whether they're checking the weather, asking for sports scores, or playing a game. About the Book Voice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant is your guide to designing, building, and implementing voice-based applications for Alexa and Google Assistant. You'll learn to build applications that listen to users, store information, and rely on user context, as you create a voice-powered sleep tracker from scratch. With the basics mastered, you'll dig deeper into multiuse conversational flow and other more-advanced concepts. Smaller projects along the way reinforce your new techniques and best practices. What's inside Building a call-and-response skill Designing a voice user interface Using conversational context Going multimodal Tips and best practices About the Reader Perfect for developers with intermediate JavaScript skills and basic Node.js skills. No previous experience with voice-first platforms is required. About the Author Dustin A. Coates is a developer who focuses on voice and conversational applications. He's currently the voice search lead at Algolia and is also a Google Developers Expert for Assistant as well as cohost of the VUX World podcast. Table of Contents Introduction to voice first Building a call-and-response skill on Alexa Designing a voice user interface Using entity resolution and built?in intents in Alexa skills Making a conversational Alexa skill VUI and conversation best practices Using conversation tools to add meaning and usability Directing conversation flow Building for Google Assistant Going multimodal Push interactions Building for actions on Google with the Actions SDK



Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up

Author : Lauren Maffeo

Publisher : Pragmatic Bookshelf

Page : 212 pages

File Size : 37,77 MB

Release : 2023-01-18

Category : Computers

ISBN :

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Book Description

Businesses own more data than ever before, but it's of no value if you don't know how to use it. Data governance manages the people, processes, and strategy needed for deploying data projects to production. But doing it well is far from easy: Less than one fourth of business leaders say their organizations are data driven. In Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up, you'll build a cross-functional strategy to create roadmaps and stewardship for data-focused projects, embed data governance into your engineering practice, and put processes in place to monitor data after deployment. In the last decade, the amount of data people produced grew 3,000 percent. Most organizations lack the strategy to clean, collect, organize, and automate data for production-ready projects. Without effective data governance, most businesses will keep failing to gain value from the mountain of data that's available to them. There's a plethora of content intended to help DataOps and DevOps teams reach production, but 90 percent of projects trained with big data fail to reach production because they lack governance. This book shares six steps you can take to build a data governance strategy from scratch. You'll find a data framework, pull together a team of data stewards, build a data governance team, define your roadmap, weave data governance into your development process, and monitor your data in production Whether you're a chief data officer or individual contributor, this book will show you how to manage up, get the buy-in you need to build data governance, find the right colleagues to co-create data governance, and keep them engaged for the long haul.



Portable Python Projects

Author : Mike Riley

Publisher : Pragmatic Bookshelf

Page : 255 pages

File Size : 10,43 MB

Release : 2022-02-01

Category : Computers

ISBN : 1680509519

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Book Description

Discover easy ways to control your home with the powerful new Raspberry Pi hardware. Program short Python scripts that will detect changes in your home and react with the instructions you code. Use new add-on accessories to monitor a variety of measurements, from light intensity and temperature to motion detection and water leakage. Expand the base projects with your own custom additions to perfectly match your own home setup. Most projects in the book can be completed in under an hour, giving you more time to enjoy and tweak your autonomous creations. No breadboard or electronics knowledge required! Get to know the latest Raspberry Pi hardware, and create awesome automation solutions for home or work that don't require an electronics degree, cumbersome add-ons, or expensive third-party subscription services. Create easy to run Python scripts on your own that make your Pi do things that would have required a team of automation experts to build only a few years ago. Connect to and control popular home automation lighting systems from a Raspberry Pi. Trigger autonomous actions based on movement, temperature, and timer events. Power on your own computer and appliances using your voice. Remotely control infrared-enabled consumer electronics, create chatbots to retrieve personalized items of interest, and implement a temperature-monitoring room fan. These are just some of the projects that the book will show you how to make. Most projects can be completed and operational in under an hour, and do not require any messy schematics or a spaghetti bowl of wires and breadboard-attached circuits to operate. Control your home or office exactly the way you want instead of relying on an expensive mysterious box of third-party technology to do it for you. What You Need: Raspberry Pi (Pi 4 Model B or higher recommended) running Raspberry Pi OS





Voice User Interface Projects

Author : Henry Lee

Publisher : Packt Publishing Ltd

Page : 392 pages

File Size : 34,25 MB

Release : 2018-07-31

Category : Computers

ISBN : 1788470222

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Book Description

Develop intelligent voice-empowered applications and Chatbots that not only understand voice commands but also respond to it Key Features Target multiple platforms by creating voice interactions for your applications Explore real-world examples of how to produce smart and practical virtual assistants Build a virtual assistant for cars using Android Auto in Xamarin Book Description From touchscreen and mouse-click, we are moving to voice- and conversation-based user interfaces. By adopting Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), you can create a more compelling and engaging experience for your users. Voice User Interface Projects teaches you how to develop voice-enabled applications for desktop, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This book explains in detail VUI and its importance, basic design principles of VUI, fundamentals of conversation, and the different voice-enabled applications available in the market. You will learn how to build your first voice-enabled application by utilizing DialogFlow and Alexa’s natural language processing (NLP) platform. Once you are comfortable with building voice-enabled applications, you will understand how to dynamically process and respond to the questions by using NodeJS server deployed to the cloud. You will then move on to securing NodeJS RESTful API for DialogFlow and Alexa webhooks, creating unit tests and building voice-enabled podcasts for cars. Last but not the least you will discover advanced topics such as handling sessions, creating custom intents, and extending built-in intents in order to build conversational VUIs that will help engage the users. By the end of the book, you will have grasped a thorough knowledge of how to design and develop interactive VUIs. What you will learn Understand NLP platforms with machine learning Exploit best practices and user experiences in creating VUI Build voice-enabled chatbots Host, secure, and test in a cloud platform Create voice-enabled applications for personal digital assistant devices Develop a virtual assistant for cars Who this book is for Voice User Interface Projects is for you if you are a software engineer who wants to develop voice-enabled applications for your personal digital assistant devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, along with your car’s virtual assistant systems. Some experience with JavaScript is required.