Skill Review: City Bike

Npci’s City Bike voice app is an initiative to connect with citizens and help them efficiently utilize the bike-share system in New York City. This Alexa skill offers its users easy access to thousands of bikes in their neighborhood – whether they’re shuttling, running errands, visiting friends, or exploring a new area. It provides real-time updates on the number of bikes available at a selected station. A new user must visit the City Bike map page to look for the station number of any preferred station and then save it as his/her favorite station through the voice app. This in turn enables them to know the station status by fetching data on the availability of bikes with a simple verbal query. In short, the skill features two major functionalities; allowing users to manage their station and providing updates on the saved station status. However, the app sets the last station accessed by the user, as the current preferred station by default and provides necessary alerts and updates on the same.

The highlight of the voice skill is that cycling enthusiasts can use it with ease, and get to know the exact number of bikes that are accessible from the desired stations across New York City. Leveraging the benefits of voice technology, this skill has embedded features that fit a biker’s basic information need. A few of the downsides that made it to the list are the instances of the voice skill ending abruptly as soon as the necessary information is relayed. The second one being, the skill does not handle unknown words and phrases from the users correctly. Yet another one is the lack of possibility for riders to choose multiple stations and set them as saved stations. Lastly, to use the City bike voice app seamlessly, bikers should know their preferred station numbers, or they will have to visit the bike-share map and fetch the station numbers to access the required information.

The VOGO Voice team scores this skill a 3.6 out of 5-stars based on our rating system. While it provides live alerts on the availability of bikes, you’ll have to try for yourself to see how timely the alerts are; and whether the briefing is truly accurate and useful.