So – I’ve opened up a new (public) chapter of my development life: Alexa Skill development.  I picked up my first Amazon Echo back when they first came out, in my desire to start working on making portions of my home “smart” (mainly, the lights in my house).  However, when they opened up the development aspect – allowing people to create their own “skills” – I also started tinkering with that (“Alexa, activate party mode!” – still working on that 😛 ).

At any rate, I decided that I should finally publish an official skill – rather than just play with them myself (which I can do – muahaha).

To that end, I have released this skill to the world:   Chinese New Year

This skill allows you to query information about Chinese New Year – on what date on the Gregorian Calendar it falls (e.g. in 2019, Chinese New Year starts on Feb 5th), what the zodiac animal (and related element) is for any given year, and the Celestial stem and Terrestrial branch in relation to the 60-year cycle.

Well, you can ask for when CNY starts on years between 1645 and 3300, anyway – calculating Chinese New Year is pretty complicated math, so I don’t support outside of that for the actual Gregorian calendar day at this point.

You can also request information about the various animals and elements, and other information generally related to Chinese New Year.

I mainly created this skill to allow my family (who celebrate Chinese New Year) to easily figure out when to celebrate each year – but I hope that you enjoy it as well!