219 - Create Alexa Skills right inside of WordPress with Shoutworks

Interview with Christian Petroske and Nathan Wrigley

So the podcast today might catch you a little off guard! It’s not something that I’ve ever played with before. Today we’re talking about Shoutworks, which is a WordPress plugin that lets you boost your voice SEO by creating an Amazon Alexa skill in one click right from inside WordPress.

Wait… What! Is this even a thing? Why would I ever want to do that?

These are the kind of questions that I had in my mind before I spoke to Christian Petroske about the plugin. I just could not get my head around why I would even want to think about voice search. I thought that Google took care of all that without any need for me to do anything!

Turns out there’s more to this than I’d imagined. A lot more!

We spent quite a lot of time at the beginning of the podcast talking about Amazon Alexa, Siri, Google home (et al.); what these devices are capable of and how they’re getting better and better, and more popular.

I think that it’s a safe bet to say that many of us have these types of devices in our home and that trend is set to continue. I’m carrying out some pretty basic searches on my devices, but I can certainly see the utility of them and the fact that you can access them all the time without having to disengage with what you’re currently doing.

We talk about what can these IoT devices can actually do; what they’re perfect for and how people are starting to use them.

We talk about whether there’s a need for WordPress people to think about this kind of technology as an extension of a website, or is it enough just to be thinking about desktop and mobile displays.

How are people using IoT devices nowadays? It might be that you’re a real early adopter of this kind of technology and push them to their limits, but it might be (like me) that you just ask them some pretty basic stuff and don’t really know the power that they can bring to bear. Are they just for asking what day of the week it is, or can them perform complex and actually useful functions in our lives.

We also talk about the remarkable rise in adoption rates and the fact that these devices are being bought up almost as fast as the manufacturers can get them off the production lines. You know how mobile took over a few years back? Well, this could be a similar inflection point, but you have to try to understand how it’s similar to, and different from, the screen-based devices that we all use today.

Then we get into the actual WordPress plug-in and how it can be used. What are the six different variations that the plugin actually enables you to do? And it turns out that it’s perfect for things like podcasting and notifications! Great news for me! Christian speaks about some of the innovative ways that his current customer base have started to use the plugin – it’s all very inspirational.

Although it’s very brief, we do touch on some of the security concerns that you might have with this kind of technology.

Honestly, this is a really interesting episode, and like nothing that we’ve ever covered before. So give it a listen and then post a comment below, or in the WP Builds Facebook Group.

Mentioned in this podcast:

Shoutworks