If you own an Alexa device, which is “an intelligent personal assistant developed by Amazon”, you can now ask it to read summaries of the latest stories from bitternepark.info and portswood.info – as demonstrated in this video.
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bitternepark.info reader Steve Hickman has kindly constructed, and made freely available, what’s known as an ‘Alexa Skill’ for our sites, which you can add to a wider summary of news and weather from various sources using the daily Flash Briefing Skill.
At the moment the Skill reads the introductory paragraph of each article, but it’s possible that a future Alexa upgrade may enable you to ‘drill down’ and hear the whole of selected articles.
Steve says what it does do is list the news items in your history in the desktop and phone app, from where you can select the Read More link and be taken to the article on the website.
As far as we know these Alexa Skills should work for all Alexa devices, including the Echo and Echo Dot, but we don’t offer any guarantees or support.
We'd love to hear your feedback, and are always open to exploring other similar ideas for spreading the news!
The Skills can be enabled for free in the Amazon Alexa Skill Store: you can just search for 'Bitterne Park', and 'Portswood'.
Disclosure: We are an Amazon affiliate, so while the Skill is free to enable and use, if you click through to enable it from our links and then go on to buy other products, or click through to Amazon generally using our links such as the ads for the Alexa devices, we may receive a small commission from Amazon at no cost to you, which helps us run our sites.