API Notification Software

[JMayor]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for viewing this board.

I have been tasked by my boss to find a way of the office amazon echo beeping every time we sell a product (linked directly to our site).

Doe anyone know of A) software that can do this currently; B) somewhere I can ask developers directly?

Please let me any suggestions you have!

If that wasn't difficult enough he wants me to set this up at our other offices too 

[kenf]

Are you a programmer, or a regular human?

A programmer could look into Skill development and see if that would enable checking for and receiving notifications (in the same way Amazon does when your deliveries arrive).

A programmer would also have the means to talk to your ordering system to know a product has been purchased.

A regular human has much less to work with.  From what I can tell, IFTTT and smart hubs like SmartThings can't send notifications or trigger music to play or speech to Alexa.  Alexa can be used to make things happen, but not the other way around.

And yes, I'm a programmer.  Just not for Alexa.

I'd say your boss has an interesting idea, but it's not a sound one.  Notifications, in the business world, are a courtesy, but I see far too many clients who rely on them as gospel.  In many cases, I see that in the form of email.  As in send me an email when a client does something.

Guess what, notifications are unreliable.  Email unreliability is written into the specification.  Non-guaranteed delivery.  Fire-drills happen because they wonder why they didn't get a notification and ignored something.

If you have employees, whose job it is to take action when a client/customer does something, sending a notification is cute, but too often, one gets missed.  Better workflow is to make a queue screen in the application your company uses to manage those orders for your employees to see those new orders, who's worked on it, what status it has for completion.  Their job, is to work that queue.

Now it could be I've over-assumed your business situation.  But you're going to go dingy by all the dings if your business is successful, and you're going to spend far too much $$ trying to make this work for the occasional Ding! if it's not.

[StevenR]

There is an Alexa skill called Notify Me which allows you to post a message to a URL and uses the Alexa push notification API in to push that message to the Echo. The device will ding and the light ring will light up yellow to tell you there is a notification and you can say "Alexa, what are my notifications?" to play them, so this may do what you want.

[kenf]

There is an Alexa skill called Notify Me which allows you to post a message to a URL and uses the Alexa push notification API in to push that message to the Echo. The device will ding and the light ring will light up yellow to tell you there is a notification and you can say "Alexa, what are my notifications?" to play them, so this may do what you want.

Good to know!  This means that a programmer can make a skill to do the same thing, but tied to your business system for when a note-worthy event happens.

 Or use the Notify Me directly, possibly from IFTTT, which in turn opens up ways to feed it.  Basically a less programmer-centric solution.