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I'm a newbie to Alexa skills development. I have a question regarding delivering reminders to users. For example, if I want to remind users something every 30 minutes, and every time the content of the reminder is different (e.g., drink water or take exercise). Is it feasible?

What I was thinking was to have users invoke the skills by saying something like "enable the reminder every 30 minutes". When receiving this intent, the skill could set a timer on the backend, and repeat the responses every 30 minutes, which means I need a loop. But from what I understand, the handler that deals with the intent doesn't work with loop. So I'm not sure how to work on that. Any ideas?

Thanks!

randomcat
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  • Welcome to [so]. Unfortunately, this site is not a forum, and is not well-suited to brain-storming. It's for finding answers to specific, well-defined questions. – jpaugh Jan 30 '18 at 23:39

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I think this question is reasonable, since the functionality is somewhat new, and isn't even part of Amazon's standard training curriculum for Alexa devs (as of my Alexa dev training in Nov 2017).

You'll want to be interacting with the Alexa "Events" API. The documentation for these events even contains a reference to recurring alarms: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/alexa-voice-service/alerts-overview.html#scenario3

You'll need to enable the functionality to disable the recurring behavior of the app. If you do that, you can just send off new SetAlert signals each time the previous event is responded to with a user Utterance.

Robert Townley
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    The link you provided is actually the documentation of Alexa Voice Service (AVS) instead of Alexa skill. After looking into many relevant posts and tutorials, now I'm not sure whether the recurring reminders are available for Alexa skills... – randomcat Feb 06 '18 at 06:00