It’s been a lot of firsts in the past few weeks! I was interviewed for the first time, went to my first Hackathon, and two days ago, on May 16th, I finally went to my first Alexa Dev Meetup! Thanks to Eric Olson for setting up the wonderful event. It featured Dylan Zwick from Pulse Labs and Jonathan Burstein from Jargon. It was a great event, I had a good time learning about these two startups, and I loved meeting new people – Milkana Brace, Ashwini Joshi, and Amy Farley. Thanks to Abhishek Suthan for the shoutout. 🙂

Pulse Labs

I learned about Pulse Labs for the first time at the Meetup. Pulse Labs is a cool company that helps you test your skill with the targeted audience.
One of the most challenging problems with developing Alexa skills is that you cannot find good people to test your skill. Your family, friends, and co-workers may be biased because they want to make you happy.
That’s where Pulse Labs comes in. Pulse Labs helps you find your targeted audience and set up a test with them. For example, if you are building a skill which is geared towards sports, Pulse Labs can find real sports’ fans to test your skill. Isn’t it amazing!
You can choose your own testers, choose theirs, or a mix of both. Then, tell them what to look for, and you’re done! Dylan gave a full demo of their website at the Meetup. He also shared a promo code for a month of free premium service, which I will not mention here. 🙂 I plan to create an account in the next few days and try it for my skill, Wheel of Fun.

Jargon

Jargon is another company that I believe is very helpful for struggling developers. A big problem many developers face is adding their skills in different languages and countries. Thankfully, Jargon’s area of expertise is helping localize your Alexa skill content. The company provides the Jargon SDK, which integrates with your skill and allows you to change content for different locales. They can help translate your skill’s content into different languages, which really helps because there are now so many locales which you can build Alexa skills for. Jonathan also explained his company’s journey, which I marveled at and enjoyed listening to.

I also recently wrote a blog post on how to localize your Alexa skill content, so check that out too!

Hope you liked this post!