By Joseph Jaquinta, CTO, TsaTsaTzu

Demotivate Me by TsaTsaTzu

With Demotivate Me you can access your subconcious’s deepest and darkest thoughts easily and painlessly. It will tell you what you already know is true. Are you tired to the endless compliments and meaningless pats on the back you get in daily life? Bring your ego down a few well deserved notches with this cracked mirror for your soul.

This is a fortune cookie skill that tries to make you feel bad about yourself. It is full of bile, venom and snark. Yet it is never crude, it just carves up your self esteem like a scalpel.

It’s a welcome change from all these “feel good” skills that just quip some pleasantry taken from some internet list somewhere. The developers quite rightly determined that the computer generated voice of Alexa is not really good at sarcasm, and so they have recorded most of the responses with a voice actor. The quality isn’t great all the time, but it’s the first skill produced that does this and it does make it much more compelling than your average fortune cookie skill.

Overall: 5 out of 5. The novelty and content win out here. The one response that is especially humorous is the one where both voices trade barbs with one another!

Ask Daddy by Rick Wargo



Ask Daddy provides comic relief by responding with an answer of no for most requests.

Comic relief is probably going a bit far. If you are the sort of person who finds humor in a father that can only say no, it probably wears thin after the first several tries. After that, it’s disable time.

Overall: 1 out of 5. I’m slightly offended as a father, but not as much as I am as a developer.

Ask Grandmom by Rick Wargo



Ask Grandmom provides comic relief by responding with an answer of yes for most requests – just like a typical grandparent.

This is a (very) slight step above Ask Daddy. Most of the time Grandmom just says “yes, certainly” (even if you ask for nonsensical things) and drops the line. But occasionally she will engage in a little more involved conversation.

Overall: 2 out of 5. It’s an improvement over Ask Daddy, but still doesn’t rise out of the demo skill level.