Drupal and Alexa: The Next Big Thing?
DrupalCon is underway in New Orleans, Louisiana, and it kicked off with the always energetic keynote from Drupal project founder, Dries Buytaert. While these regular keynotes, known as "DriesNotes" in the Drupal Community, tend to focus on the state of the Drupal project, with updates on the development cycle and community interests, there is frequently also a particularly inspiring look toward the future. This year, Dries wowed the audience with a quick demo of a Drupal site communicating with an Amazon Echo to provide a personalized shopping experience via Echo's conversational interface. And perhaps most interesting was Buytaert's take on conversational interfaces as the next big shake-up for developers and content creators, much like mobile interfaces changed the way we approach web development in the recent past.
The integration is achieved via the recently released Alexa Module for Drupal, and should be exciting for developers anxious to experiment with the Amazon Echo as well as generally exploring the concept of a conversational interface and all its possibilities.
You can watch the Dries Note below, and you'll find the Echo demo around 41:00.
You may also want to check out the Ultimate Guide to Drupal 8 for more info on the latest version of Drupal. It's written by one of our favorite Drupalers, Angie Byron.
Katherine Druckman, a self-described Drupal fangirl, is the Director of Digital Experience at Linux Journal. She’s an HTML-flinging, PHP-hacking webmistress by day, and a refined connoisseur of historic architecture and fine Chinese ceramics by night. She usually can be found surrounded by the charm of aging Texas buildings from the pioneer days or appreciating ceramics of the Song and Qing dynasties. You can contact Katherine by e-mail, webmaster@linuxjournal.com.
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