Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at 5:00:00 PM WeWork Corrigan Station 1828 Walnut St, Kansas City, MO

• What we'll do
Don't miss the first Kansas City Alexa Meetup! It will be special.

The Kansas City Alexa Meetup is the best opportunity to gather users & developers who are passionate about Amazon Alexa. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, join the KC Alexa community to learn more, share and build your skills.

Join us at this first KCMO Alexa Meetup on Wednesday, April 25 to hear Amazon Alexa Evangelist Jeff Blankenburg and Alexa Champion Bob Stolzberg share the vision for Alexa and talk about how you too can create voice-enabled services for your users with Alexa. We will have special gifts, amazing speakers who will provide an overview of the conversational user interface industry, Skills Marketplace, and several interesting Alexa use cases. We will have several Amazon Echo/Dot's available to use and we'll be raffling a few cool prizes, too.

Agenda:

• 5:00 - 5:30: Doors open, free finger food, drinks & networking
• 5:30 - 6:00: Introductions and shout outs
• 6:00 - 6:30: "Alexa Voice Industry Overview" presentation by Bob Stolzberg
• 6:30 - 7:30: "Creating Alexa Skills" presentation by Amazon Alexa Evangelist
• 7:30 - 8:00: Raffles, food, drinks & networking

Alexa Abstract:

Amazon Alexa, the cloud-based voice service that powers Amazon Echo, provides access to thousands of skills that enable customers to voice-control their world, whether it's listening to music hands free, controlling their smart home devices with a simple ask of "turn on the lights," setting timers when their hands are busy in the kitchen, listening to the news in the morning as they get ready for work, or even ordering a pizza.

You don't need to have a background in natural language understanding (NLU) or speech recognition to build great voice experiences for Alexa. Through a series of free, self-service, public APIs like the Alexa Skills Kit (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit) and Alexa Voice Service (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-voice-service), developers can build new skills for Alexa and integrate Alexa into their products and services.

Speakers:

Jeff Blankenburg, Amazon Alexa Evangelist (@JeffBlankenburg)
Jeff has been an Amazon Alexa Evangelist for 2 years but spent the early part of his career in digital advertising, building websites for Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Ford Motor Company, among others. He also spent 9 years at Microsoft, primarily as an evangelist for any new development technology he could get his hands on. Today, he works on the Amazon Alexa team helping developers make Alexa even smarter. Jeff has also spoken at conferences all over the world, including London, Munich, Seattle, Chicago, Australia, and New York. He also serves as an organizer for the Stir Trek (http://stirtrek.com/) conference. On the academic front, Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Ohio's Bowling Green State University!

Bob Stolzberg (@bobstolzberg)
Bob Stolzberg (http://www.linkedin.com/in/bstolzberg) is the Founder & CEO of VoiceXP, a leading Alexa SaaS software company focused on the Alexa for Business space. Bob is an official Amazon Alexa Champion who has presented at Re:Invent 2017, the Alexa Conference, TedX St. Louis and several Voice Industry podcasts. Bob has also served as a subject matter expert in the areas of Cloud technology and DRBC for the past several years and has more than 20 years of engineering experience in the IT industry. In his spare time, Bob is a water lily farmer and scientist.

• What to bring
Bring a laptop if you want to c0d3..

• Important to know
Make sure you have registered for an Amazon Developer Account at http://developer.amazon.com and Regular Amazon AWS Account at http://console.amazon.com (No Cost, but requires a credit card)

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