Alexa, take over the world!
We recently had our quarterly “innovation day” (hack day) at Signiant where the engineering team can work on any project they wish for a 24 hour period. You may have read my previous blog post on the coffee shamer some years ago. Generally though, there are some cracking projects that come out of these hack days with some being essentially ready to ship as part of our products.
This year, the devops guys wanted to do something with voice control. As we all had Amazon Echo devices, it seemed natural to try and create an Alexa skill to do “something”. After spending some time bouncing ideas around, we settled on a skill to get the status of our Signiant cloud services and maybe some other stats.
After finding a short blog post on creating an Alexa skill and with all of us being familiar with AWS Lambda and python, I was amazed how easy it was to get a skeleton skill created with just some hard-coded prompts. We then spent the rest of the time allotted getting the information we actually wanted to return from the skill (most of it publicly available from status.signiant.com)
Lessons Learned
The lessons learned from this hack day for me continue to be the same as every one I’ve participated in:
- Keep it simple. The clock runs fast! You don’t need to have something complex for it to be awesome.
- Everyone in the team can contribute. In our small team of 3, each of us contributed something to the project
- Learning new stuff is fun! We’d never seen an Alexa skill before this project and yet we had something usable in a day
Results
Here’s what we’ve ended up with (and are in the process of submitting to the Alexa store so anyone can use it). We took out some things from our actual hack day that were proprietary data (and the “red alert” siren which was amusing but would be annoying fast).
First up, let’s ask Alexa what’s the status and show what happens when everything is a-ok…
Now, let’s ask Alexa the status but simulate some kind out outage…
Where can I find this great skill?
Our skill was approved and is listed in the Alexa Skill store. From the Alexa app, go to Skills and search for Signiant. You’ll find this…
Is your company running innovation days/hack days? If not, see if you can. Yes, it’s a day of time but some of the innovations that your teams will come up will supprise you (and may even be shippable quality!)
The code for our skill is available in GitHub
