Welcome to Astro-ph for Alexa Flash Briefing

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This is a simple project to allow you to listen to your favorite arXiv category on Amazon Echo device. This is done by using the “Flash Briefing” function on Alexa.

There are a few components for this to work:

  1. On AWS Lambda, a python script converts the RSS feeds from arXiv into a JSON file that is readable by Alexa.
  2. The python script itself is a Flask application. This is because we need to apply Alexa Flash Briefing with a web link to the custom-formated JSON file.
  3. Because we are using the simple Flash Briefing instead of Alexa Skill Kits, basically we are not able to change the following:
    • the number of articles to be read
    • the category
    • many others things…

This page is https://wingkitlee0.github.io/alexa_astroph/

Guide to Setup..

  1. We choose AWS Lambda to host and run our python script (Flask app) for conversion. So we will first need to setup a way to upload and deploy a Flask app to AWS. This can be done using zappa.

  2. After the whole setup process with zappa, there should be a link for the lambda function, like this https://atawkf2zyd.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev. The output is basically some json document that satisfies the Alexa Flash Briefing format.

  3. Then we can use this link for the Alexa skill.