We spoke with Chris Maury (@CMaury) about using speech recognition to interact with devices.
Note: Please turn off your Echo and Dots as we invoke Alexa a lot.
Chris is the founder of Conversant Labs. They created TinCan.ai which can help you wireframe or prototype a conversational user interface. They can also help you build Alexa Skills, though if you are so inclined, you might try it for yourself: Alexa Skills Kit.
Chris will be speaking at the O'Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco, CA in March 2017, giving a tutorial on building voice based user interfaces. You can read more from Chris on his Medium posts medium.com/@CMaury.
Some of the embedded devices Elecia mentioned:
We haven't gotten embedded.fm (or any podcast) to work with Alexa but we aren't sure why. Have you?