Recently those of us who work at Mando were lucky enough to receive an Amazon Echo Dot for us to start to play with and to see if we could innovate with them in any interesting ways and as I have been doing a lot of work recently with the Microsoft Bot Framework and the Microsoft Cognitive Services, this was something I was keen to do. The Echo Dot, hardware that sits on top of the Alexa service is a very nice piece of kit for sure, but I quickly found some limitations once I started extending it with some skills of my own. In this post I will talk about my experience so far and how you might be able to use Microsoft services to make up for some of the current Alexa shortcomings. Read More