OR engineer came out. Really nice guy, tested our line. Replaced the socket, tried cleaning out stuff in desperation. He couldn’t find a thing wrong either internally or externally. Had our IP profile reset I think as we had 76meg when he left. Soon dropped down again. Not as badly though, resigning myself to losing 20meg because I transferred from Plusnet to BT. Shouldn’t happen as it’s all the same backhaul. I should have exactly the same speed more or less. I was expecting better as I was getting newer equpiment.
As you say off-topic so I shall stop moaning about my broadband now.
Ordered two a few weeks ago, really love them. Alexa is just a far superior experience to Siri currently.
I’ve been thinking how a banking skill might work. For me to use it with confidence, I’d want voice authentication, where Alexa shares an audio file of your wake word with the banking API as auth. This would mean you wouldn’t need to actually do anything extra to authenticate and your kids couldn’t take the piss by transferring your entire salary to their Osper card. For example.
I don’t think voice authentication and/or audio file tranfer is something that the Alexa platform can do yet, mind.
Mike, you’re right about voice authentication being a great feature especially for a banking skill and about the likelihood of this becoming a native feature (potentially through acquisition of Sesame).
Hey Saveen, I’ve not worked on my echo hack for a while (been busy doing all the things needed to launch Monzo as a full bank!) There’s a couple of problems that need solving.
1/ Authentication via voice. With our Siri integration, you still need to use your thumb print to authenticate before money moves. In the future we’ll support sending money by API (but we’ll use a notification on your phone to confirm, with your thumbprint if you’re on iOS or pin code on Android).
2/ Enrolling/linking a monzo account to an echo is currently not possible (my hack had my api key hardcoded.) Hopefully Amazon will implement some kind of Oauth2 flow in the companion app to make this possible, otherwise it’ll be something like “Please go to this website and type in this 8 digit code that’s only valid for 30 seconds.”
I’m really excited about this, but don’t have time to work on it at the moment.
As someone fully entrenched in the Google ecosystem (multiple Nexus devices, Chromebooks, Android Wear, Android TV) I have to say I’m more excited by Google Home.
Alexa seems cool but the kind of deep learning and advanced AI that Google have going on is lightyears ahead, it’s just that Amazon took a gamble on a new hardware idea and made it work.
If anyone ( @anon42748375 ) fancies taking a stab at building this, i’ve got permission to buy some Echo Dots to give out. It’ll be on a kind of “if you build it and it works, you can keep the echo” basis. Send me a DM or email simon@monzo.com
I’ve had a go at this over the weekend, I managed to get four main features working:
Ask Monzo how much your balance is
Ask Monzo how much you’ve spent today
Ask Monzo how much you’ve spent over [some time period, e.g. 1 week]
Ask Monoz how much you’ve spent on [a spending category, e.g. groceries] over [some time period]
Here’s a quick demo of it action
You can find the code repository here:
It could still use some work: Testing live on Lambda is a huge pain, so some local way of testing would be ideal, I started work on that, but didn’t get time to finish it this weekend. There are also some issues with Alexa mixing up some of the utterances/intents sometimes.
A little late to the party as @anon11058247 got there way before me and used an actual real Echo instead of just Echosim.io… but here is a very slow demo of my Python (Flask) implementation using a HTTPS server instead of Lambda:
Again please excuse the slow responses (my server isn’t very fast), my odd sounding voice through this mic and the shameful balance. I promise I’ve topped up now.
Those pesky kids!
cc:
Send me a DM or email 
.