Alexa, the voice of Amazon's artificial intelligence-powered Echo device, can stream songs, read you audiobooks, suggest a cocktail recipe, order you a Lyft, tell you if you left your garage door open, and more. But given she was only brought to market in 2015, she still has her limits.
Now Alexa's next skill could come from a code bootcamp student.
On Tuesday, Coding Dojo, a Seattle-based code bootcamp with a six locations nationwide, including Chicago, announced a partnership with Amazon to include a module--a few days' training and projects-- on programming skills for Alexa on the Echo, developed with help from Amazon's Alexa team.
Students in the Python stack program have the option to add the Alexa module to their 14-week, in-person Coding Dojo bootcamp at no extra cost. Coding Dojo will also offer a series of free Youtube tutorials on coding Alexa skills, and will host a hackathon led by Amazon Alexa employees on February 20, 2017 in San Jose, Calif (which will be open to the public).
"We are launching a module for Alexa due to partner and student demand," said Paul Schindler, community manager at Coding Dojo, over email. "Coding Dojo attended the IoT for Cities hackathon in May, where our teams developed skills for Alexa, including a text feature that allows Alexa users to contact 911 and send a message to friends or family members during an emergency, such as a home invasion, to get help. In addition to Amazon, we have partnered with Uber and others, and would love to partner with other organizations."
Coding Dojo alum have previously gone onto work at Amazon, said CEO Richard Wang in a statement.
“The new class, videos and hackathons will give both novice and existing developers invaluable project experience for their resumes and portfolios," he said. "With a number of our graduates already working at Amazon, we're hopeful that these types of real world projects will help more of our students get the opportunity to work on exciting new technology like Alexa.”
Coding Dojo opened a Chicago location in September. They offer full stack development programs, including Ruby/Rails, Mean and Python. The 14-week Chicago program costs $13,495 (though there is currently a promotion offering the winter cohort for $10,995). The Amazon module will be available for students in the cohort that begins in January 2017.
