Amazon and SmartBear Host Alexa Roadshow at SmartBear’s Headquarters

Amazon’s Paul Cutsinger and SmartBear’s Paul Bruce Discuss Using Amazon Web Services with the Alexa Skills Kit – Wednesday, February 10, 2016 – Somerville, Massachusetts

SOMERVILLE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- SmartBear Software, the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), are hosting Alexa Roadshow: Learn to Build Voice Experiences on Wednesday, February 10, 2016 at SmartBear’s Corporate Headquarters in Somerville, Massachusetts. Paul Cutsinger, Principal Alexa Evangelist at Amazon, and Paul Bruce, API Product Manager at SmartBear, provide an introduction on how to build voice capabilities, called skills, for Alexa, the brain behind the Amazon Echo and any Alexa-enabled device. Skills enable customers to interact with devices in more intuitive ways using just their voice. The hands-on training demonstrates how to use Amazon Web Services with the Alexa Skills Kit to quickly create a skill, and then test it using SmartBear’s API Readiness tools.

“Alexa devices are a focal point right now for innovation by creative thinkers and doers alike,” said Paul Bruce. “They combine the tremendous power of hardware and cloud, provide a platform for innovation and help us ask questions about how Internet of Things (IoT) user experiences can transform our lives, both at home and at work. We’re truly fortunate to host this event and see what our awesome local developers come up with during the hackathon.”

The free event includes an open hackathon where attendees have the opportunity to get hands-on with building a new Alexa skill, including 1:1 help from Alexa experts, and a chance to win Amazon devices. The event starts with an introduction to Amazon Echo, and how to build an Alexa Skill using both AWS Lambda and AWS Beanstalk. Next, attendees receive an overview of the certification process and learn how to get their skills published.

This is also an opportunity for hackathon contributors to get a sneak peek at SmartBear’s latest API testing framework, Ready! API TestServer, an exciting new developer-focused model for writing API tests to quickly and comprehensively verify the reliability of APIs and integrations between apps, services and devices.

“We are delighted to host this workshop and hackathon with SmartBear, and are looking forward to seeing what sorts of skills the Boston community builds for Alexa,” said Rob Pulciani, Director, Amazon Alexa. “Alexa is open to all developers so that they can create voice experiences for their customers, allowing them to interact with their services in more natural, intuitive ways.”

For more information or to register for the event, visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/alexa-roadshow-learn-to-build-voice-experiences-tickets-20945718207

About SmartBear SoftwareAs the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications. For more information, visit: http://smartbear.com, or for the SmartBear community, go to: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+.

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View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160204005887/en/

BroadPR
Tracy Wemett, +1 617-868-5031
[email protected]

Source: SmartBear Software

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