esimkowitz/pocket-reader

Read Pocket articles with Alexa

Article Reader

Read Pocket articles with Alexa

TODO

1. Add blurb to beginning of each article to announce the title and author
2. Reduce the delay with loading new article segments (maybe cache them in the background?)
3. Figure out how long audio assets should be held onto before discarding
   • Should they be deleted immediately after use?
   • Should I try to incoorporate a smart caching scheme (probably not this one)?
4. Add support for lists and headers in the HTML parser, also authors.
5. Implement a system to delete left-over Polly Queue table entries and audio assets when a playlist entry is deleted.
6. Add ability to queue unspecified number of articles
   • i.e. play back all articles until told to stop
7. Streamline the process for deleting old assets
   • Maybe keep a list of currently-downloaded assets in the playlist object so fewer repeat queries need to be done
   • Or combine all the audio asset objects into one list object with an index marker
8. Streamline the cleanup phase so that old audio assets are reliably deleted
   • Maybe keep track of when an asset was last played and delete it when it's been idle for too long
9. Try implementing an automated deploy pipeline for the skill by following this tutorial.
10. Simplify the tracking of playlists, current index within an article, etc. by using the this.attributes object instead of a separate table.
11. Look at bespoken.io as an option for easier skill development

FIXME

1. Update playNext and playPrevious actions to play next/previous article, rather than next/previous audio asset.
2. Ensure that playNext and playPrevious set the curr_index back to zero
3. When more than one item is queued in the playlist, the numSlices attribute is sometimes copied from the first item
4. When only one item is queued to the playlist, sometimes a second ghost item is added with no attributes other than a copy of the first item's numSlices
5. Figure out why the first audio asset is sometimes repeated at the start of an article's playback.
6. Something is preventing the articles from playing past the second audioAsset