Amazon have done another micro-release of three skills as a prelude to it's App Store for the Echo. You can access these on the "skills" tab of your companion app. Looks like they will be doing three a week. Here, then, is this week's review of the new skills.

Bingo by LME Skills

Enjoy a game of Bingo anytime you like! With the Bingo skill, Alexa will call the numbers for you. Each number is repeated and sent to the Alexa app as well. You'll need bingo cards to play, but don't worry if none are handy: just click on the Skills link at lovemyecho.com to download a free PDF with bingo cards and instructions. During the game, you can simply say "Next" to hear the next number. Say "Bingo!" when there's a winner. Play one or more rounds, then say "Game over" to end the game.

This is another skill from LME, who brought you Crystal Ball last week. This one is a little more to it.



Ease of Use: 3 out of 5. The user interface for the game is pretty straightforward. It's easy to learn, but there are a few detracting points. Games can go on for quite a while. An actual bingo caller mixes it up a bit in how they tell you the number and column. This skill doesn't, and since the tone can't change, it gets a little monotonous. The other problem is that, although it's pretty good at recognition, you end up saying "next" enough times that it eventually gets it wrong. After that, it's game over. There's no way to restart a game. Same thing happens if the skill crashes in the middle, or you are pulled away for a moment. That last quibble is that the text on the card is clearly the same text that gets read out. You can tell because it is punctuated to put in pauses for the speech synthesis. It would have been a nice touch if the card text was formatted for reading.



Usefulness: 4 out of 5. If you like Bingo, then it's great. If you don't, you needn't bother. I can see you keeping a table of a few kids of exactly the right age entertained with this for a while. But it's a little hard. Any chatter is going to confuse Alexa and reset the game. But, for the right age, that just adds to the gameplay.



Novelty: 3 out of 5. It is an interesting enough idea. In my search for simple games that work for the Echo, I never thought of this. The execution is straightforward though. No particularly nifty lessons to take home and apply to your own skills.



Overall: 4 out of 5. Bingo is a solid player app for The Echo. If you like it, you'll probably use it a lot. If you don't, you won't.





Cat Facts by deegles.co

If you've ever wanted to know more about your feline overlords, Cat Facts is for you! Get fun cat facts at any time. Almost one hundred facts available!

One of the weirdest things I ever came across was a web site devoted to Cat Facts... on Darknet. Here is this clandestine, cloak and dagger platform, frequented by hacktivists, handlers of illicit goods, (and the odd Ethical Hacker such as myself) and bang! A website about cats. It just goes to show that cats really do get everyone on the Internet. So why not on The Echo?



Ease of Use: 5 out of 5. You ask it for a fact about cats, it tells you one. It doesn't get simpler than that. There isn't much to it, but there doesn't need to be. (Asking it to say "Meow" is a nice touch, though.)



Usefulness: 4 out of 5. If you have no interest in cats, then just forget it. Me, I love cats. And, yeah, I know the API used to back this is public, but it did end up telling me things I didn't know despite my infatuation for the furry beasts. (One of which is clawing me for attention as I write this!) So I have to give a thumbs up for that.



Novelty: 3 out of 5. I should have expected this, but I didn't. It is a format that would let you turn any listicle into an app. It might have been more interesting to see it grown into a general front end for listicles. Cute icon, though.



Overall: 4 out of 5. Cat Facts is fun and rather random. I'm going to keep it enabled to lighten up my day during boring moments.

Tide Pooler by Amazon

Do you live in a coastal city and spend time by the water? Rely on Tide Pooler for tidal information for major coastal cities. Information source: NOAA.gov.

This skill is for retrieving high and low tides times and amounts in a select few coastal cities. Kind of the same way you can ask The Echo about the weather, but for the more maritime inclined.



Ease of Use: 3 out of 5. The basics are there, but there are a few rough edges that would have been nice to have been filed off. Unlike the weather skill, Tide Pooler doesn't remember you, so you need to tell it your city each time. The city choice is actually quite limited and the list is rather long to sit and listen too.



Usefulness: 2 out of 5. The number of cities served is quite limited. And the number of people who really want to know tide is even more limited. So I can't see this becoming a break out skill. Also, how do you have a low tide of "-1 feet"?



Novelty: 2 out of 5. The Echo comes out of the box with a bunch of look-up functionality. Not being a follower of sports, I use it all the time to find out if the Red Sox won so I know if the local restaurant is offering free kid's meals. But the built in skills do a better job than this one. There are plenty of use cases for look-up skills. Following the design of the built in ones would be better than following this one. And choosing something less marginal than tides would also be good.



Overall: 2 out of 5. Given that Amazon did this, I would have thought their time was better spent making it part of the default skill set (so they know your location). Or adding settings to the weather app to also report tides.