Here is a recap of new posts for the week of September 5^th on the Amazon Developer Blog:

14-Year-Old Girl Creates CloudStatus Alexa Skill That Benefits AWS Developers

Meet Kira Hammond, the 14-year-old creator of CloudStatus—an Alexa skill that summarizes information on the AWS Service Health Dashboard. Kira wrote CloudStatus with AWS Lambda, using Amazon EC2 to build Python modules for Requests and LXML.

Building Retroids with GameMaker – Part 3: Handling Controllers

In part 3 of the Building Retroids with GameMaker series, Jon Pulsipher takes a closer look at handling controllers, focusing on connectivity loss, analog thumbsticks, triggers, and home buttons.

Introducing the All-New Fire HD 8 Tablet

Amazon introduced the all-new Fire HD 8, the next-generation Fire HD tablet designed from the ground up for all-day entertainment. Fire HD 8 also introduces Alexa, the cloud-based voice service, for the first time on Fire tablets—just press and ask to play music, launch games, read audiobooks, and more—coming soon.

New Video: Using Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) in Alexa Skills

Watch this 20-minute video walks through adding SSML support to your Alexa skill and how to pause Alexa’s speech, change how she pronounces a word and how to create and embed your own audio tags.

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