I was listening to Leo Laporte talking on one of his shows about how cool it was that you can play TWiT podcasts using an Amazon Echo, via TuneIn Radio. TuneIn is a service that lets you listen to over 100,000 live radio stations but also on-demand content like podcasts. I heard about TuneIn from Todd Whitehead who runs Alpha Geek Media. Todd spreads the live NosillaCast show via Alpha Geek which in turn sends it to TuneIn radio which is awesome.
That got me to thinking it would be cool to find out if Alexa, the Amazon Echo’s personal assistant, would play the NosillaCast. My friend Diane has an Amazon Echo which she loves. She’s showed off to me all this really cool stuff it can do so I asked her to test podcasts for me. I told her that TWiT should work but that I really wanted to know whether the NosillaCast would play on demand by voice.
I should warn you, it does not go well.
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Diane explained one more interesting bit after the comedy. There is an Amazon Echo app for iOS with which she can ask it to play the NosillaCast via TuneIn…and it works just fine. So the Echo doesn’t hate the NosillaCast, it’s only Alexa who has the attitude!
I occasionally use Tunein when borrowing Wifi from somewhere else. That is if I remember to bring my earphones. This is what Siri looked for when I asked it to look for Nosillacasts. “This is what I found for no sew a cast”. Gotta love those personal assistants.
ROFL – I must tune in to this no silly cast, sounds like a fun show 🙂