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Can I make an Alexa Skill That Searches Bing Via My Personal Account?

 

 


 Can I make an Alexa Skill That Searches Bing? 

 I use Bing as my search engine, and would love it if I could ask Alexa and have that trail of searches attached to my account to look back upon.

 Fun fact: When you ask Alexa a question, it's already using Bing. But it's not using my account. So let's see if I can walk through the idea.

 Questions:

 Alexa searches the internet when you ask it a query. What specifically does it search? It's own database of information? Is it like ChatGPT where the system is not directly connected to the internet but has all of the internet up until a certain point in the past?

 Can I make an Alexa Skill that attaches to a dataset of information I host on AWS? The preliminary search reveals Knowledge Skills, which seems to be "give us information and when people ask about it, we can just tell them within the scope of our knowledge."

Would I need AWS to make an Alexa Skill at all?

Most likely;

When you create a custom skill, you create either an AWS Lambda function or a web service that can handle requests from Alexa. The code you write for this service needs to [ have a request and response].

From here

Can I use an AWS Lambda Function to Search Bing?

 Lambdas run a single function. Theoretically it is possible to simply have it run a search query. We need to attach it to a runtime (Programming language).

 How could that single function look like?

if TriggerWord = "Hey Bing"

    run search.Bing([spoken query])

Turns out there's an entire language to coding a skill. This video outlines it well. 

If I wanted to activate a skill, say, "Alexa, ask Bing, for local movie times.", it would be outlined as such;

The wake word is Alexa

The launch word is ask

The Invocation Name is Bing

for has no particular meaning. 

The Utterance is local movie times. And utterances lead to Intents.
(local movie times could also be a slot, as that's the specific thing we're asking for. Slots can go within utterances)


I think the second part of that code would need more information.

Me too. Maybe a lambda isn't the best option.

Could I use a Lambda to log into my Microsoft account and then use more resources to have it search afterward?

Maybe! Let's conceptualize some code!

if TriggerWord = "Hey Bing"

    run login.Bing({email | password})

 Yep, I think we need more code. Possibly something that opens the login URL and logs in for us, unless Bing has an API to do that.

 I asked Copilot to make me some Python code, and I adjusted it a bit. I didn't tell it it was for a mock AWS Skill.

    if user_vocal_input == "hey bing":
        def open_bing_login():
    # URL for Bing login
        bing_login_url = "https://login.live.com/"
        webbrowser.open(bing_login_url) 


How long would that take to run? This is not a header question, but me asking "from Trigger Word, to log in, to the actual process of logging in, to searching and retrieving information, how long would it take?"


Has This Been Done Before?

Yes, but the Skill was removed; It used to bring back the first page of Google search results.

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