12343 “Alexa, ask 约炮视频 to play a Hermit Thrush.” With those eight words, Amazon’s voice-activated assistant gives you one of the sweetest songs on the planet. “Alexa, ask 约炮视频 to play a Snowy Plover.” With that, you're whisked away to a beach in Monterrey, where plovers scurry between dune and wave. That’s the kind of effect Ed Norris wanted when he designed the 约炮视频 Bird Songs Alexa skill. The software architect, who splits his time between Ohio and Kentucky, loves to study birds on his fishing and camping trips. Hearing the species’ voices, he says, helps pull him back to those places. Which is where Alexa comes in. At first, Norris used the technology to fetch sounds from Google searches—but the results weren’t always accurate. So, he decided to cut out the middleman by “teaching” Alexa to link common species names back to the 约炮视频 Guide to North American Birds. The 约炮视频 went all in on the offer, granting...