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Amazon’s new Alexa feature

Amazon’s new Alexa feature uses AI to create animated stories on Echo Show

by Sonal Shukla

The Echo Show is a new Alexa-enabled device that features a touchscreen and speakers for watching videos, making video calls, connecting with services like Pandora and Amazon Music Unlimited, controlling smart devices around the home, providing information (ex. weather), or even ordering pizza or re-watching last night’s TV. But Echo Show also has an innovative new Alexa feature called Storytime with Amazon Polly that uses artificial intelligence to transform text into lifelike audiobooks you can listen to anytime.

Alexa’s Storytime with Amazon Polly is a multi-media feature that uses Amazon’s Natural Language API to allow you to choose what you want Alexa to “read,” whether it is a children’s book, the latest bestseller, or one of your favorite audiobooks. The feature uses text-to-speech (TTS) technology so you can listen to stories even when Alexa isn’t listening. You must be using a Wi-Fi-enabled device, and it is available on the latest generation Echo or the Amazon Fire TV (2nd Generation). Note: Stories created in Storytime will not sync with devices that don’t have Alexa.

If you have an Echo Show, you can launch Storytime and select from a list of pre-loaded stories including The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development. You can also create your own customized stories. To create a story, launch the Alexa app,
(1) click on the menu button in the top left, then select “Skills.”

(2) Search for “Storytime” and select it.

(3) Select “Create your own story.”

(4) Choose a title for your story and provide a description that will be displayed.

(5) Click Submit for Review, which will send your suggested book title to Amazon for review.

After the review process is complete, you will receive an email from Amazon informing you of their decision to approve or deny your suggested title. If you have selected a pre-selected book title, then Alexa will read the story directly from Amazon’s library.

How does Alexa’s Storytime with Amazon Polly work? Each story is a series of text-based node segments (1), so-called because they use a nonlinear structure similar to a tree (2). They are organized using a tree data structure (3), which means that a parent node holds multiple child nodes. Each child node contains data that is relevant to only one of the child nodes it is connected to.

To understand how these nodes are organized, imagine each story as a tree with three additional branches at the end: dialog, description and music. A node in the story will be represented by an MP3 file, whereas a link to another node in the story will be represented by an audio clip for that corresponding audio segment.

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