I ordered the voice preview edition to experiment with. While I wait for it to ship (back ordered) I’ve been thinking about things to try with it.
Yesterday I realized that one of the things we use Alexa for the most is quickly getting local business hours. eg. “What time does Lowe’s close?”, etc.
I imagine that this would be a pretty complicated request. It would probably need to
A) first extract the business name from the query, and do a web search with some added search terms to try to find the store page for the location closest to us.
B) Parse the page for hours, and isolate the hours for today (Saturday? Wednesday?, etc)
C) figure out if I was asking for opening time or closing time, and if it’s already closed, figure out what the next opening hours are. i.e. “X is already closed, but will reopen on Monday at 8:00 am.”
D) and then somehow return an accurate and coherent response.
We typically only ask Alexa this question for a finite set of businesses so maybe it would be easier/better to build it to know how to parse the hours from the webpage for several specific stores, rather than use an AI agent to interpret any arbitrary store web page. But, it would obviously be more convenient/cool to be able to support those rare times we ask it for some other arbitrary local business and have it know how to look the information up.
Anybody done anything like this? Thoughts on how it could be accomplished?