Loginbroker

Needed to get the word out on our loginbroker.com product - a consolidated OAuth identity provider.   As Alexa skills developers we needed a simple way to allow our users to authenticate to a wide variety of websites.  In Alexa parlance this is called "account linking".  Say for example you want to create a skill that allows the user to ask Alexa if they have received any new emails.  In order for Alexa to talk to the user's email provider they must grant permission via "account linking".   Let's say for argument the skill will work with Gmail.  The developer provides the Alexa skill information on how to connect to Google's servers, what application/skill is asking for the permission, etc.   This allows Alexa to have a conversation with Google and prompt the user with "is it ok for the "email checking" skill to look at your Gmail?"   The user grants permission and now the skill can query Google on the user's behalf and ask if there any new emails.

Now that is great if all your users only use Gmail but of course there are other email providers like Outlook/Hotmail that are just as popular.  Unfortunately Alexa can only communicate to one authentication service - the developer can't add one for Gmail, one for Outlook, one for Yandex, etc.  This is where loginbroker.com comes in.  Loginbroker can be configured to have the user pick from a list of "providers" - they can even pick multiple providers - or even multiple accounts within the same provider.  So in the end the skill could have access to one account from Gmail and two accounts from Outlook and all the end user has to ask is "do I have any new emails?"   The skill of course still needs to do the work of asking Google and Microsoft if there are emails for the given accounts.

Loginbroker can also be used as a generic account manager.  Say your application doesn't want to deal with passwords/validation but does want content tied to a user's unique account on some other system like Facebook, Google, or Amazon.  With loginbroker the developer can specify the providers they would like to deal with and loginbroker will return such info as email address, username, and photo.  That information could then be used to create a simple profile or just the username could  used to grant permissions or establish ownership of content.  The developer does have to create application accounts on the requested providers and give loginbroker the information it needs to connect to the authentication servers but their application will only need to store the credentials needed to connect to api.loginbroker.com.   This holds true when creating Alexa skills - only the credentials for loginbroker.com need to be provided.

You can "see" loginbroker in action by trying out the loginbroker Alexa skill.  Just say "Alexa, enable login broker".   You can then say "open login broker" - you will be asked to link an account - you can use the Alexa app for that or just use alexa.amazon.com.  When you open the skill a second time it will reveal what it was able to pull from your linked providers.