INFLUENCERS.md

Influencers

• Cathy Pearl - VP of User Experience at Sensely, Author of the O'Reilly book Designing Voice User Interfaces Twitter Linkedin
• Paul Cutsinger - Working with developers to design and develop voice based user experiences. Currently: Alexa, Alexadevs. Previously: Appstore, Disney. Twitter
• Dave Isbitski - Works for Amazon's Alexa, evangelist. Host of Alexa Dev Chat Podcast. Twitter
• John Kelvie - Building stuff for Alexa, Google Home and Bots at Bespoken Twitter
• Milkana Brace - Founder of Jargon, a platform to enable voice applications to manage their content and reach global users. Twitter LinkedIn
• Jonathan Burstein - Founder of Jargon and creator of the jargon-sdk-nodejs LinkedIn Github
• Steven Arkonovich - Steven Arkonovich is a professor of philosophy and humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Steven was an Alexa enthusiast from the very beginning, actively writing Alexa applications before there even was an API. He has since developed a Ruby framework for quickly creating Alexa skills as web services. Linkedin Linkedin Github
• Andrea Bianco - Andrea Bianco is the owner of a Smart House Consulting business in southern Arizona. She provides consultations, and design guidance, and offers technical installations, including those using Alexa-enabled devices such as Amazon Echo and Echo Dot. Twitter Linkedin
• Tilmann Böhme - Organizer of the Amazon Alexa & Other Voice Interfaces – Berlin, Germany meetup Twitter Linkedin
• Mark Carpenter - Mark was an early adopter of and advocate for Amazon Echo and developing skills using the Alexa Skills Kit. He has published the ASK Dev Weekly newsletter since September 2015. He also was the chief architect of the Alexa Project curriculum currently offered to Bloc bootcamp students. Twitter Github
• Mandy Chan - Mandy first discovered Amazon Echo while attending a 2016 developer conference in San Francisco. She watched a team working with an Echo and it instantly appealed to her interests in both back-end software development and artificial intelligence. Since then, she has developed more than a dozen Alexa skills and won three hackathons for Alexa skills: Best Use of Alexa at TechCrunch New York, Grand Prize Winner at Manhattan Angel Hack, and HackItTogether. Twitter Github Medium
• Brian Donohue - After taking the company Amazon Echo home for the weekend, Brian immediately recognized the power and potential of the platform and began developing custom skills. His first skill, called Nonsmoker, allows former smokers to track how long it has been since they quit smoking; it is available in the Alexa app. In addition to active development with the Alexa Skills Kit, Brian also founded the NYC Amazon Alexa Meetup. Linkedin Github
• Joel Evans - Founder of the Boston Echo / Alexa Developers meetup; Organizer of Alexa month-long hackathon; Twitter Linkedin
• Drew Firment - Drew Firment’s most popular Alexa skills are ones he made with his 14-year-old daughter, who happens to be a big Harry Potter fan. Linkedin Twitter
• Leor Grebler - Daily Medium posts about Alexa Voice Service, Echo, and speech technologies; Founder of the Ubiquitous Voice Society Toronto Meetup group; Twitter Medium Linkedin
• April L. Hamilton - Maintains "Love My Echo" consumer website; ASK Dev Tuesday blog series at Love My Echo; Her Crystal Ball and Bingo skills are among the first four skills from independent developers to be released by Amazon for Echo. She holds the rank of Alexa Guru on Amazon’s developer forums. Twitter Facebook
• Tom Hudson - Tom helped lead a popular Alexa skill-building workshop at SXSW in 2017. In just three short hours, attendees built skills that would build awareness for political or social causes. Several of the skills from that workshop are now available in the Alexa Skills Store. Linkedin Github Medium Twitter
• Darian Johnson - 3-part blog series on using Amazon Machine Learning to predict the best time of day for exercise and automating the model with Alexa; Tutorial on how to build a magic mirror using Alexa, AWS, and a Raspberry Pi; Darian continues to contribute to the Alexa community, by sharing the source code to his projects, providing feedback to other developers and blogging about expanding the use of Alexa in his home. Twitter Linkedin
• Ryan Kroonenburg - Creator of "Alexa Development For Absolute Beginners" course; Alexa Devs Dublin meetup speaker Twitter Linkedin
• Matt Kruse - After creating one of the first dozen skills ever published and building some skills for personal use, he saw that his greatest contribution could be in building a framework for others and in assisting the growing community of developers. Recognizing the unfilled need for a Node-based framework for building Alexa skills on top of AWS Lambda, he first created the alexa-app framework, and then the alexa-app-server container for hosting javascript-based skills. These projects and others they have spawned continue to be popular and are maintained by the open source community. Twitter Github Facebook
• Bob Lautenbach - Bob is the co-founder and Chief “Tinker” Officer of Voceio, a firm that designs and builds custom Alexa skills in Orlando. He says he started tinkering with Alexa skills shortly after the technology debuted—and he’s hooked. Bob is the founder of the Orlando Alexa Meet-up group, and he recently helped found a similar group in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He often shares the source code and templates for his project with the Alexa community. “I try to give back to the community,” he says. Twitter Github
• Sam Machin - Sam is a strong believer in rapid prototyping to discover the optimal solution for both the user and the technology. He is very interested in the Alexa Voice Service and particularly enthusiastic about the idea of getting Alexa everywhere. Twitter Github Linkedin
• Oscar Merry - Oscar is the Head of Technology at Opearlo - The Voice Design Agency that helps organizations make their products, services, and content accessible through voice using the Amazon Alexa technology. Oscar also runs the London Alexa Devs meetup, which he set up in July 2016 in eager anticipation of the Alexa technology coming to the UK. The meetup has held several events and has grown to a community of more than 200 Alexa developers. Twitter Linkedin
• Eric Olson - Creator of "Alexa Skills Kit Responder" Twitter Linkedin
• Terren Peterson - Terren is currently developing interactive voice applications using the Alexa platform. He has created multiple Alexa skills. Most recently, he integrated Alexa Voice Service with a Raspberry Pi to create Roxie, the voice-activated pitching machine that won first place in the Best ASK with Raspberry Pi segment of Alexa’s Internet of Voice Challenge on Hackster.io. Terren is now experimenting with the analytics capabilities of Alexa to understand and improve skill usage. Twitter Github Linkedin
• Walter Quesada - Walter is a speaker and co-organizer for the South Florida Emerging Technology Group and a speaker at the South Florida Code Camp at Nova Southeastern University. He is also an O’Reilly author and a Pluralsight instructor with a course titled “Developing Alexa Skills for Amazon Echo". Twitter Linkedin
• Nick Schwab - Nick advises aspiring Alexa developers to keep their voice commands short and sweet. He also urges newcomers to spend as much time as they can in Alexa’s growing community of creators. Regularly helping Alexa developers in the Unofficial Alexa Slack Group. Twitter Linkedin Github
• Bob Stolzberg - Bob hosts the Saint Louis Alexa Meetup group, and he encourages developers who are new to Alexa to seek out community. Twitter Linkedin
• Hicham Tahiri - Creator of Alexa Designer, a visual conversation design tool, now part of Smartly.ai; Organizer of the Amazon Alexa - Paris meetup; Twitter Linkedin
• Mark Tucker - Mark founded the Phoenix Alexa Meetup, and he developed the open-source Alexa skill serverless starter template. He wants new Alexa developers to know that getting started is easy. Anyone can get up and running quickly using the tutorials in the Alexa Skills Kit. Linkedin Github Twitter
• Rick Wargo - Applying his professional expertise in software development, he has created an environment to craft Alexa skills where BDD drives the development methodology. With a lifelong practice of giving back, Rick has released those tools in the form of a skill template and a full-featured Alexa skill to the open source community. Rick is an active participant in other open-source Alexa projects, contributing to Matt Kruse’s alexa-app and Mike Reinstein’s alexa-utterances. Twitter Linkedin Github
• John Wheeler - John Wheeler is the creator of Flask-Ask and the Alexa Skills Kit development framework for Python that enables rapid skill development. He also created AlexaTutorial.com, a resource for leveling-up quickly with Flask-Ask and the Alexa Skills Kit. Twitter Github YouTube
• Austin Wilson - Austin Wilson taught Alexa how to drive a motorized car, winning a second-place award in Hackster’s Internet of Voice Challenge (IoV) with Raspberry Pi. Then he taught Alexa how to communicate with ships in the video game Elite Dangerous, winning first place in the Amazon Alexa API Mashup Contest. Linkedin Twitter Facebook
• Steve Tingiris - Founder at Dabble Lab, a technology R&D company that specializes in helping businesses build solutions for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Twilio Autopilot, and other emerging technologies. Steve has published more than 100 technical tutorials and courses and grown the Dabble Lab YouTube channel to become one of the most popular online sources for learning how to build skills for Amazon Alexa and other similar platforms. LinkedIn YouTube