Alexa skills kit expands to include Canadian French

Amazon announced developers can start building French language voice experiences, or “skills”, for customers in Canada using the Alexa Skills Kit with the Canadian French voice model. The skills developers create now will be available when French language support launches for Echo devices in Canada soon.

We’re also excited to share that device-manufacturers building Alexa-enabled products for customers in Canada can request early access to an invite-only Alexa Voice Service developer preview.

foodora and 7-Eleven launch delivery for 48 stores Canada-wide

Foodora, Canada’s popular on-demand food delivery service, announced their collaboration with convenience store giant, 7-Eleven. Using foodora’s mobile app, Canadians will now be able to order items and special bundles from 48 7-Eleven locations, right to their doorstep.

Canadian consumers now have an even more convenient way to get snacks, drinks, hot food, and everyday items. Even 7-Eleven’s iconic Slurpee will be available using foodora. All orders made through foodora are available via delivery and pick-up.

This collaboration is the first of its kind between a retail convenience store of this size and a food delivery service in Canada. While foodora has ventured outside of food delivery before, delivering items such as customized socks for Father’s Day and soap for Mother’s Day, this is the first convenience store available on the platform. This collaboration enables foodora to expand its product offering for consumers, delivering items from 7-Eleven such as Advil, tissues, and more.

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Here’s our first look at a ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ poster

The summer of 2019 might seem like a lifetime away but that’s creeping up on us and it wouldn’t be long before we get more details about what’s coming next for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And the one that will set the stage for what comes after Avengers 4 is Spider-Man: Far From Home. And we get a first look at a movie poster for the film courtesy of Brand Licensing Europe, a licensing expo where Sony Pictures is promoting its releases for 2019. While there isn’t much you can take away from it, it does remind us that the film is coming and it means we’ll get to hear more as we get closer and closer to the movie’s release.

Marvel’s head honcho Kevin Feige talked about this before about what the movie could mean for the franchise and MCU as a whole. He said, “Well, I mean, sure, let the speculation begin. That's always fun. We like [the title] of course because it ties into Homecoming, not just keeping that word going, which we like and we liked it more than Homecoming 2, but that notion of 'home' is a word that has dual meanings we'd like to continue with this [Marvel Cinematic Universe] version of Spider-Man. So, Far From Home has multiple meanings. Much like Ant-Man, there are things that people know about that movie, which is a great deal of the movie: the villain of the movie, the storyline of the film, that we're shooting in Europe and that Peter Parker goes on continuing that [Captain America: Civil War] was a big giant super hero class movie. The fall out of that in Homecoming was John Hughes and him going to his high school. So that's what's fun to us about the Spider-Man movies. And again going from Infinity War to Ant-Man and the Wasp, the tonal shift."

Anki’s Vector robot to come with Amazon Alexa integration

We’re seeing more and more toy robots out in the market and one of them is about to get smarter. Anki confirmed in a blog post from its CEO Boris Sofman that the company is working with Amazon to integrate Alexa into the new Vector robot. This Wall-E lookalike will be getting the integration in the future as Sofman say they are still in early development stages. He acknowledges that these robots can’t just be cute but need to smart enough to last for years, which he claims they plan to keep doing for the coming years. The Alexa integration is expected to arrive by the end of the year.

On top of this, though, Anki is working on things like pet detection, delivering messages, music recognition, home monitoring, and a 360-degree camera. The Anki Vector is coming to stores in the US on October 12^th for US$250. 

Source: Engadget