News Skill - Station Requests

Plugins & Skills Feedback / Support
6

Been anticipating the day ABC news in Australia might get added to News skill - this would be great please!

edit: adding direct stream url if it helps http://www.abc.net.au/res/streaming/audio/mp3/news_radio.pls

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7

Hey @builderjer and @bradgy

Currently the News Skill plays short news bulletins rather than streaming the 24 hour news radio channels.

How do you think we should differentiate between them?
If you were asking for the news, how would you naturally say that you want the longer radio stream, rather than the shorter news bulletin?

@Bradgy - the good news is that we already have an Australian ABC News Bulletin. If your device location is set to Australia it should play for any general news phrase like “What’s the news”. Or you can set it to be your default in your Skill settings. Or you can just ask for it specifically with “play ABC News”.

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Wow, I guess I should have been paying more attention… it works precisely how I would have imagined just by saying “play ABC news”. Thanks Gez!

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Good point @gez-mycroft. CPR is a division on NPR, so the short news stream is already in the News skill. I will see about writing one specifically for CPR. Thanks for the feedback.

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10

Hi ! Where can we propose some feed ?
i.e. for french news : France Info en 3 minutes

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Hey aldo, what acronym would you give this station?
RF - for Radio France?

Also a good logo for the Mark II and other GUI displays would be great

12

It looks like this thread may be dead/archived, but I am surprised no one supported the idea of having the live version of news stations. I had been using a google smart system and it was my favorite feature.

@gez-mycroft you asked how to differentiate the discrete news segements from a live stream. It would be amazing if you could simply say something like “Play NPR news live” to get the continuous stream. I may have to move back to the Google overlord (boo) if this is not a feature in this ecosystem.

Thanks!

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13

Hey @T3Knical

Thanks for the feedback.

Feel free to open a PR to support your idea or even write a live stream news skill if you feel comfortable enough!

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Spanish public broadcast TV and Radio have both live streams and on demand channels, both video and audio only (RTVE).

I’ll have a look into the feeds myself, it could be one of my first contributions to the Mycroft community :slight_smile:

My mom has an Alexa speaker (Echo v3, I think) and she listens to Spanish radio stations and news channels in it. We’ll see.

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15

Now that we’re at it… Has anyone looked into YouTube Music?? (My streaming music service of choice, given that I have a YouTube Premium account).

I’ve seen Spotify, Pandora, Emby and I don’t know if the absence of YT Music is due to lack of popularity or because it can’t be done dude to API restrictions or something :slight_smile:

16

I will avoid YouTube because they compensate artists the least - by far. See Music streaming compensation to artists

I keep hoping Mycroft will partner with Napster or Tidal since they compensate the most, and have a recommended music streaming service (trying to be patient, but it’s not one of my virtues :))

-Mike M
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I understand your reasons.

Anyway… I have a YouTube Family Premium account (me, wife, kids) because we use YouTube a lot. That subscription includes YouTube Music, so… It’s difficult to not use it :slight_smile:

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Hey @T3Knical, welcome to the Forums :slight_smile:

It’s good feedback that people are keen for continuous streaming news channels. One thing we’ll have to decide is how we disambiguate which version you want.

I’d imagine that:

  • “play NPR hourly news” = short clip
  • “play NPR live” = streaming live
  • “play NPR” = ?
  • “play NPR news” = ?

What would you expect these utterances to do?

In terms of broader Music streaming - the biggest limitation is the licensing. There are a number of music skills out there, but they are susceptible to being shutdown or facing legal issues. We don’t want to land in the same place that we did with Spotify so are still working on providing a collaborative solution with one or more of the services.

19

Great to hear! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

-Mike M
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It would make sense that “play NPR” and “play NPR news” would both provide the short clip. Only the keyword live would produce a continuous stream.

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22

Two skills projects that are related that might get you started: Large effort… and Small effort…

23

Thanks for directing me to these. I tried the simple small effort as the other one seemed a little out of my league and I can only get it to throw errors. It has been a fun ride but for $15 I can have the ease of big Google spying on me and not spending hours trying to get simple tasks to function. Thanks for trying to help!

24

Hi Can anyone tell me how to issue the command to Play Spanish News using - RNE Spanish National News?

No matter what is said, whether Play RNE, Play Spanish National News, Play RNE Spanish National Radio etc. etc. it doesn’t play.

I can say Play BBC, CBC, DLF, PBS you get the picture, but not for love/money can I get RNE to play by issuing a voice command. Any suggestions welcome.

I’ve bodged it by setting RNE as the default for now but as we’re not native Spanish speakers it’s not ideal.

Thanks in advance

25

Hey,
Can I propose the swiss news feed SRF (it is in german)?
The audio feed can be found here: Nachrichten
And here are some pictures/icons:
https://ws.srf.ch/asset/image/audio/0e9c6e21-0da4-4f7a-9f2c-011a988ded2f/PODCAST/1651129246.jpg
https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/7bBilP5If9WZQ07FzLMgGYRfGqW_0hmPxk6v58Xdh_6wcoCcXYe_hQIB8iiS2q8Gn2xR
https://www.srf.ch/static/cms/images/960w/60fb42.jpg

Thanks in advance :smiley: