My Journal for Amazon Alexa

Introduction

My Journal allows you to write journal entries using Amazon Alexa. Entries can be made for the current day or for previous days. You can also search past entries. All that is needed is a device with Alexa, such as an Amazon Echo, and a Google account. The journal is saved as a table with the name Journal in Google Drive and can be manually edited at any time.

Privacy Policy

The My Journal Alexa skill, hereafter referred to as My Journal, processes Google account user tokens. By agreeing to “link My Journal and the user’s Google account” in the Amazon Alexa app, the user agrees that the Alexa service can request Google account user tokens via Google OAuth and pass them on to My Journal, which allows My Journal to see, edit, create, and delete only the specific Google Drive files the user uses with My Journal and also see, edit, create, and delete all of the user’s Google Sheets spreadsheets. My Journal uses the token only to create, see, and edit a Google spreadsheet file called Journal in the user’s Google Drive. The tokens are not stored anywhere or used otherwise and are discarded after each request.

Journal entries are entered by users themselves using Alexa voice input. Entries are then sent to Amazon’s Alexa service and passed on from there to My Journal, which is hosted in Amazon AWS Lambda. From there, they are sent to Google’s Spreadhseet API and persisted in the Journal spreadsheet in Google Drive. A Journal spreadsheet uses one line for each entry in which the date and text of the entry is saved, as well as the current timestamp.

A user’s journal entries can also be retrieved. After a user has identified which entries should be retrieved, journal entries from My Journal are retrieved from the Journal spreadhseet in Google Drive and passed on to Amazon’s Alexa service, which in turn sends them to the user’s Alexa device where they are spoken out by Alexa.

My Journal persists users' journal entries exclusively in the linked Google account under the file Journal in Google Drive. No further storage takes place. For more information on how Amazon Alexa processes this data, see here.

A user’s journal entries are never shared with other users or otherwise made available to third parties. Of course, a user can choose to use the functions of Google Drive to share a Journal spreadsheet with other Google Drive users or to make it public.

A Journal spreadsheet can be edited or deleted by the user at any time using Google’s own Google Docs user interface.

The use of Google user data other than that specified above excplicitly does not take place.