i´m looking for a way to use Alexa as a notification and dictionary system for newly released papers and announcements from a site.
For that, i would use an Node.js instance on a Raspberry to crawl intervally new PDFs.
I´m quite new in the Alexa environment and looking for some directions.
Q: Is there a way to make Alexa lookup these PDFs and read definitions of asked keywords like the Wikipedia query skill? Q: Would it be better to make the raspberry not public available over the internet and instead push the data intervally to a cloud database which is queried by alexa? Q: Do i have to parse it in a machine readable format? Q: Is there any better way to crawl the data?
Thank you for any advices
I believe you are asking how to make an Alexa skill that can make queries such as "are there new papers about ?"
You are correct that a good design is for your scraper to be separate and publish to a database. You can then create a skill that uses an intent with a AMAZON.SearchQuery slot to capture the users query. Your skill code can perform the database lookup and decide how to respond.
You may find the following helpful: https://forums.developer.amazon.com/questions/128538/sample-skill-using-amazonsearchquery.html.