Voice Assistant Skill Lists That Can Be Sent As Email

This summer I am making a personal voice assistant, because I like the idea of Alexa but I don't like volunteering to be spied on. Read the setup Post here.

Today's skill is TODO/grocery lists. It sort of branches off the reminders skill in that it uses the same persistence mechanism. But there's no deadline or date parsing, and I can add items to the list.

For now there's just one list. I can add items, remove items, clear items, and have the assistant read me the list. That's reasonably useful, but the main thing that makes this a skill that I will actually use is that I can ask the assistant to send me the list as an email.

I considered doing a text message, but I don't feel like setting up Twilio right now. I will look into free tiers, but it was very easy to just set up an email client in Python and send the list to myself. I can even ask the assistant to send the list to a different email address, which is nice for sharing the grocery list with my partner.

I might play around with email templates and different configurations later to make the email look fancy but it's already been genuinely useful for me to be able to add items to the list as I think of them and then send it to my phone when I leave for the grocery store! Definitely the most useful skill I've built.

I'm impressed with the local model's ability to parse more complex items. In the screenshot below, I wasn't really expecting the "coffe, any brand with rainforest certification" to be understood properly, but it worked. (Now if only the models were better with non-English place names...)