Creating Alexa Skills: Yancey Grantham, My African Safari

At Storyline I spend a lot of time speaking with Alexa skills developers who range from 7-year olds to creators in years.

For Alexa Skills to succeed, we as a community need to share our accumulated knowledge. This is the second in a series of interviews with experts working on Alexa Skills who have offered to share some of their expertise.

Yancey Grantham — the creator of My African Safari Alexa Skill.

In today’s interview, we sat down with one of our customers from the day one, Yancey Grantham, to talk through the challenges he faced creating multiple Alexa skills that are getting thousands of users.

Inspiration

— Yancey, thanks so much for taking time to chat! What inspires you to create Alexa skills?

Shout out here to Alice Langholt. She heard about Storyline, played with it, found it fun, and invited me into the sandbox. I’ve been building sand castles ever since.

— What did you start from?

I started by reusing older projects and playing with the create an infinite sentence technique at first.

My Alexa Skill Tell Me Why You Like Me is a good example.

Tell Me Why You Like Me Alexa Skill by Yancey Grantham.

Funny story, I can’t update or change this skill now. The title is not allowed by Amazon because they updated their policy to not allow skills with titles that sound like natural language.

If I change it, I have to change the title, and Tell Me Why You Like Me has 5,570 unique users in 200 days, so I don’t want to do that.

— Fair enough. How many skills for Alexa have you built so far?

Seven live, four in development, one for personal use not published, and six failed “tests.”

The Idea

— Can you tell us in detail what My African Safari skill does?

My African Safari is an interactive adventure in Kruger National Park that you can play on Alexa.

My African Safari Alexa Skill by Yancey Grantham.

You can go on adventures with unexpected twists and turns including going for a bush walk, stalking lions, helping archaeologists with a dig, making paint, creating rock art, doing some smelting, and getting chased by a rhino.

At every interaction, pick a path with each ending linked to two other places in the skill. It doesn’t end until you want it to. Over 100 blocks and 66 different intents.

Vasili’s post says:

“Deliver useful and educational content through your skill.”

The skill includes:

• Multiple short entry phrases (each time different) that tell of the history of the region.
• Teaches paint making techniques over 100,000 years old.
• Let’s you play with a bloomery to make marbles or iron ore.
• Join an archeology dig and confirm ancient human trade patterns.

— Wow, that’s incredible… What inspired you to create it?

After reading your blog post, “What I Learned From 5000 Reviews of Top 5 Alexa Skills,” I started experimenting with storylines.

I was merely trying to get higher per session utterances because that shows that someone is using it.

— How did you come up with the concept?

I made a colossal test skill in the old UI that got too big, and I couldn’t finish it. Challenged myself to use what I learned and created with what my adventure research returned. Research returned a Safari in South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

Implementation

— How you built it, what were the first steps?

Many missteps before finding a pattern I liked.

Lot’s of diagrams on paper. Lot’s of testing in Storyline. Lot’s of dead ends.

— Was it hard to create such a long interactive story?

My African Safari Alexa Skill has over an hour of content, commitment mattered.

The hardest part is keeping it simple.

Y at ever interaction = rice on the chessboard problem. I have up to 10 squares or steps. I ended up with 26 endings.

Here’s how it looks in Storyline:

How My African Safari Alexa Skill looks in Storyline.

You can play with an interactive preview of the skill here: https://getstoryline.com/shared/projects/f6f63eb7f69d1dc8795938728675942c20c46b0e

— How was your experience of creating a skill in Storyline?

I was lucky enough to use the old User Interface and to see Storyline grow. My experience with software saw improvements in huge jumps.

Storyline gets better with every week.

As an example, the latest improvement streamlined the use of audio files. It saved me 12 clicks per audio file. For this skill, with over 100 audio data, that was 1,200 more clicks than the next skill I work on. (Thanks Maxim Abramchuk and other developers!)

I can choose where I spend my precious art time. I prefer to spend it on Storyline because I am having fun.

— What was the primary challenge for you in creating My African Safari skill?

The primary challenge was keeping the time between interactions short.

Also, challenging myself to create mini sounds scenes like getting chased by the rhino.

Learnings and Tips

— What did you learn from building it?

Storyline gets more fun the more you use it! Ha!

Seriously, I tried to do it without a plan, but with Alice’s guidance, I created a framework to work from. It made the creation process manageable, without creating too many paths to close. I learned planning is worth the time spent on it.

— What’s next for My African Safari skill?

I’m working on its companion skill, river adventures at Victoria Falls, a little south of Kruger. The two were developed in tandem.

— Can’t wait! What other skills are you going to create?

Almost finished with a skill for Amazon’s current Life Hack challenge. My skill teaches the real-world memory technique, the Method of Loci.

A sweet life hack, mind hack. Its a skill teaching a skill.

— Any tips for people who want to start making Alexa skills?

Sure, here’s how I would start creating skills for Alexa:

• Make a simple skill quickly just for fun.
• Read Storyline blog while asking yourself, “What could I build from learning from this?”
• Use another person as Alexa while prototyping.

This skill has a lot of Alexa spoken text. My tip for that is: listen and fix, listen and fix. Fix anything that doesn’t flow smoothly.

I scatter .4s and .6s pauses liberally and specifically.

Interactivity is the key. Make sure the user is an active participant. Users phase out with too much Alexa talking before an interaction.

I do break this rule, but I try to keep talking to less than 30 seconds.

• Always be asking yourself, “how can I make this conversational?”
• Make a skill that is an inside joke just for family and friends.
• Remember, you can make skills for yourself that you don’t publish but can use on your own Alexa system.

Thanks for reading! 🙌

Check out other skills built by Yancey here.

Have questions about the product? Feel free to ask them in our community.

Best, Storyline team.