In my latest professional change I’ve moved into a role with a bright and shiny title: Data Scientist. I’ve heard all the hype around Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, and I don’t buy a lot of it. I do believe these words will change how we do everything. I just don’t know that…
Data Analysis…can we automate this?
As some of you know, I’ve moved from consulting back into a full-time employee for Crop Pro Insurance. There was so much opportunity in this role. First of all, this role gives me my first full-time data science credit. I also get to build a team to support data science projects. On top of that,…
Metadata Model Update
As I began learning Biml, I developed my original metadata model to help automate as much of my BI development as I could. This model still works today, but as I work with more file based solutions in Azure Data Lakes, and some “Big Data” solutions, I’m discovering it’s limitations. Today I’d like to talk…
Data Warehouse Efficiency
How quickly do you get from the business coming to you with “we need a data warehouse” to delivering that warehouse? If you’ve sat through any Biml talk, you’ve undoubtedly heard stories of thousands of staging packages being generated per hour. You may have even heard tales of source systems being analyzed in hours, rather than…
Alexa Telemetry Data
When you build an Alexa skill you’ve got two rich sources of information describing how users are interacting with your skill. The first is the data in the Alexa Skills Kit request object. The request object is the JSON representation of what you said to your Alexa device. Alexa Voice Service(AVS) takes your spoken words…
Building our Alexa Skill Function
In putting together the demo for this blog, I found there is an issue when saving data to the Alexa Session data. I can’t reliably write to this collection in the request/response JSON. Without this ability, I’d have to write a session manager myself. Honestly, I don’t have time for that. I’ve reached out to…
Building our Alexa Skill
Currently, there are two ways we can construct our skill. You can use the Amazon developer portal, or you can use the Alexa Skills Kit Command Line Interface (ASK CLI). Unfortunately, the CLI option is based in Node.js. I’m not a fan, thus the reason I started writing my skills in C# instead. Alexa Skills Kit…
Alexa Design Process
Let’s start designing our Receptionist skill. The purpose of this skill will be to help visitors who come in for meetings alert the employee they’re meeting that they’ve arrived. We want to make this interaction as natural as possible, so we don’t have to have someone walk a new visitor through the process each time. …
Alexa Solutions Infrastructure
With an understanding of the Alexa ecosystem and some of the terminology I’ll be using, let’s look under the hood a bit today. All Alexa devices depend on the cloud to do the heavy lifting. In the most simplified case, this is what’s under the hood of a simple Alexa skill. You speak to your…
Alexa Terminology and Documentation
n my last article, I introduced the hardware, the differences between the Alexa Voice Service (speech recognition and language understanding) and the Alexa Skills Kit (new and interesting abilities you can create for the Alexa ecosystem). I also covered four current skills categories. Today let’s cover some key terms you’ll want to understand before beginning your…