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Sound Library – FI

Amazon Adds New Alexa Sound Library for Developers

Amazon regularly releases tools to make Alexa skill development easier. The latest announcement is for the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) sound library. The new sound library is a simple way for developers to add rich audio accents to their Alexa skills. A blog post by Amazon’s Shiraz Datta comments:

“The ASK sound library makes it easy for you to create an engaging customer experience by adding unique sounds to your skill. The library provides hundreds of sounds from 14 categories including, cartoon, home, human, nature, and transportation, among others…By carefully selecting a sound, you can create an experience that is more personal or relevant to your skill. For example, you can add applause when a user answers a question correctly in a trivia game or finishes a workout, a creaking door when describing a scene in an adventure skill, or the sound of a door opening when Alexa receives a command to unlock the front door.”

Alexa Sound Library and Speechcons

The new library covers a wide variety of sounds that are particularly well suited to games and storytelling. There are animal and battle sounds and others related to ambiance and science fiction. These new sounds complement the speechcons released in 2017 that are intended to add interesting interjections within a skill such as “bah humbug,” “ding dong” and “bonjour.” Taken together you can see how the sound library and speechcons can help developers make skills more immersive.

These tools also save developers the trouble of sourcing sound files for their skills and managing them. They can simply call them with a simple line of code. Amazon was initially focused on helping developers get Alexa skills live quickly. The many tools and templates achieved that goal and has yielded tens of thousands of Alexa skills across a half dozen countries. Newer tools such as the recently updated analytics dashboard and rich audio sound clips are more focused on enhancing the quality of skills.

Amazon Updates Alexa Developer Console and Adds Retention Statistics

January 2018 Voice App Totals Per Voice Assistant


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Group volunteers

Volunteers at Cape Disappointment State Park with collected garbageGroups of all kinds may help with park improvements such as trail maintenance, tree planting, litter pick-up, minor repairs, stream restoration, preparing parks for summer visitors, and more. Families, clubs, organizations, schools, businesses, and other groups are invited to volunteer at state parks. Groups also may participate in annual volunteer events, such as beach cleanups.

Scout troops

Boy and Girl Scout troops are a big part of the volunteer force at Washington state parks. Scout leaders and troops provide valuable assistance to parks while enjoying the great outdoors.

High school students

High school students, both groups and individuals, may be able to fulfill their service requirement for graduation by arranging or participating in a volunteer park improvement activity.

Volunteers at Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park demolishing a restroom Adopt-A-Park

The Adopt-A-Park Program gives groups a chance to offer longer-term care to their favorite parks. Adopt-A-Park groups are asked to commit to two or more service projects in a given year or to an annual service project for two or more consecutive years.

For more information about group volunteer opportunities, contact your nearest state park or region office.

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Is Google PageRank dead?

1 minute read

PageRank is dead, long live PageRank.

As we said recently, there’s been lots of speculation as to whether PageRank is dead or not. It isn’t, just Google are moving the goals a bit. Basically, they don’t want you to focus on PageRank but it’s still massively important to them.

All this talk of dead, reminds me of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch, only in this case, it isn’t dead. An anti-dead-parrot if you will.

So what’s with all the news about PageRank being dead? Google just changed their code, that’s all…

What’s going on then?

Originally, everyone used the code in the Internet Explorer plugin, then the Firefox plugin came along.

The common thing about both was the URL they used to lookup the PageRank:

Note: The first %s is the checkhash, while the second is the actual URL you’re looking up.

Back in August, James Slater was investigating the new Google Related chrome plugin only to discover the new PageRank lookup URLs:

Also, if you used to use the host “” this no longer works either, use “” instead.

Let there be code!

As part of our ongoing commitment to our PageRank lookup tool, not only have we fixed our code, but we’ve released working PageRank scripts to GitHub.

PageRank is dead, long live PageRank.


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No Wake Speed Limit

Speed limit and boat wake control zones exist throughout our boating region. Almost none of these speed zones are depicted on our nautical charts. Often, but not always, the speed zones are marked by on-water buoys or signage along the shore. Signage for No Wake zones is often private to protect nearby docks or marinas. Rules and regulations for these speed zones are established by local city, county, state, provincial and port authority laws. Various controlling authorities police and enforce speed limit and no wake zones for the safety of people, boats, marinas, and shorelines. Speed limit and no wake zones are not normally depicted on charts and may or may not be marked with signs or buoys.

There are a wide variety of different signage and buoys marking speed limit and no wake areas. That being said, boaters are expected to operate their vessels in compliance with these regulations. Speed limits and no wake rules are imposed by a variety of different jurisdictions, including cities, port authorities, county government, provincial government, and state government.

In general:

  • Speed should be reduced and wake minimized when within 100 yards of shore.
  • Reduce speed and minimize wake when near beaches, swimmers, kayaks, canoes, and divers.
  • A “No Wake 5-knot speed zone” requires a speed that produces a minimized wake which may be less than the 5-knot maximum.
  • Kill your transom wake by briefly halting outside a marina entrance.
  • Big fast boats should be especially carefully with their powerful large wakes.

NOTE: This is not a complete list but does include many of the commonly visited locations.