Day 1 — Alexa Skill Development

The Design Phase

This article is a platform to document our learning on day one of our final project at Makers

Idea Generation

The group was aligned on creating a custom Alexa skill. Some suggested ideas were:

• Alexa skill written in either Ruby, Python or NodeJs
• Alexa trivia game
• Interactive Alexa version of snakes and ladders (single player or multiplayer)

We settled on a game idea where Alexa was the game master and the user could move around a physical or virtual board as they answered trivia questions correctly.

Challenges

As we are unfamiliar with the Alexa platform we are currently facing the following issues

• Environmental setup — unsure of how organise the repo
• TDD — preliminary research suggests that this isn’t possible
• Deployment — Restricted to AWS
• Continuous integration — needs further research

Minimum viable product

• User can start the trivia game (official name TBC)
• Alexa can ask the user a trivia question
• Alexa can receive a response and inform the user if they are correct

Fig 1: Board layout and Alexa interactions

Fig 2: Alexa response cycle after each phase

Fig 3: Potential board design

Fig 4: Alexa skill response path