Today is an awesome day! My goal of having my cancer story shared in as many languages as possible on all seven continents is moving forward as I launch my first Amazon Alexa Skill – Surviving Throat Cancer.
So what is an Amazon Alexa Skill? Amazon has created a virtual assistant called Alexa, who is similar to iPhone’s Siri, but is far more advanced. Alexa can shop for you, play your favorite music and podcasts, look up information for your kid’s research papers, play family games, and much more. It is entirely voice activated through Amazon’s small table-top device called the Echo. (We have one and it’s awesome!)
An Alexa Skill is the voice app that works on any Alexa-enabled device. (iPhone has apps, while Alexa has skills.) My skill, which is called Surviving Throat Cancer, can be enabled for free right through Amazon.com. On it, you will hear my voice on several audio recordings talking about a range of topics related to HPV throat cancer: prevention, treatment, caregivers, survival, and more.
To find my skill, simply search “cancer” or “surviving cancer” on Amazon.com under Alexa Skills, and then look for my SupermanHPV logo. You then can “enable” it to listen and interact with it on your Alexa-enabled device. Once enabled, you will can say, “Alexa, open Surviving Throat Cancer.”