Integrate Amazon Alexa with Microsoft To-Do

I love to be organized and to use tools to plan out my day, week, life. Every morning the first thing I do when I sit at my desk is bring out my ToDo list and plan out what is on my day.

What ToDo (Toe Doe)

I have used several planner like tools out there, Outlook Tasks, ToDoist, Wunderland and Microsoft ToDo but after several years of use and playing around I have settled on Microsoft ToDo. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles as some of the others but it gives me everything I need, its free, I can share lists, and it allows me to manage and plan those tasks.

Integrate with Alexa

Several of these apps are integrated with Amazon Alexa which adds the benefit of being able to speak my list and they automatically get added to my app. I had used this functionality with ToDoist and Alexa’s shopping list. This allowed us to call out to Alexa to add stuff to our shopping list and then when we went shopping we had the list on our phones. Unfortunately MS ToDo does not have that capability embedded so I needed to add it myself. There are several ways of doing this. I can write an Amazon Alexa skill application to integrate with the shopping list and MS ToDo, but I really don’t have the time right now to spend trying to get my head around Microsoft API (convoluted) and security. The alternative is to use some work flow orchestration tool. I have used several in the past for some other functions so I thought why not apply it here.

What did I use?

To be honest it is not one step and your done and really it is a work flow that only a hardened developer like myself would do. It works and it is keeps me from having to change my ToDo.  I use IFTTT, Microsoft Flow, Gmail, and of course Alexa.

Now the video

Take a look at the video to see how I did it. I provide slides and all :). This is my first Facebook live video so please forgive the noise and newby of it all. Have fun and be sure to like, or comment. Especially if you want more stuff like this.