Alexa Service for interacting with the Federal Reserve Bank's FRED® API.
This is a third-party application that is developed and maintained independently of the Federal Reserve Bank. As such, it is not affiliated with or supported by the institution.
This application was built to provide users with a framework for leveraging natural language to request information about economic data from the FRED® API. It is built on top of the FRB python package.
Create a Lambda Function Deployment Package leveraging your lambda_function.py and the modules listed in requirements.txt. To avoid compatibility issues, it may be best to build the modules on an Amazon Linux EC2 instance.
From the AWS CLI, create the Lambda Function and upload your deployment package (you can also do this directly via the AWS Lambda Console):
aws lambda create-function --region [your_region] --function-name [your_function] --zip-file fileb://[your_package].zip --role [your_aws_iam_role] --handler [your_lambda_handler] --runtime python2.7 --timeout 15 --memory-size 512
From the AWS Lambda Console, add the "Alexa Skills Kit" event source to your Lambda Function.
From the Alexa Developer Portal, create your application. Be sure to enter the correct Amazon Resource Name (ARN) for your Lambda Function under the Skill Information tab. Our Intent Schema and Sample Utterances are available in Indicators/interactions, and our invocation name is "Economic Indicators". Test and deploy!
Ask Alexa for the value of GDP:
Alexa, ask Economic Indicators for the value of GDP.
Get a response from Alexa:
Gross Domestic Product is eighteen thousand, one hundred and forty-eight point four in billions of dollars.
Existing Home Sales Household Income Unemployment Rate Probability of a Recession Housing Starts Loan to Value Ratio of New Car Loans Federal Funds Rate Nonfarm Payroll Median Sale Price of Existing Homes Total Construction Spending
Visit the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis to browse all of the available data series.
Note that some data series are owned by third parties and subject to copyright restrictions. If a user requests information about a copyrighted series, and if we have not yet obtained permission to return information about the series, Indicators will return a copyright statement.
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2016 National Association of REALTORS®
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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