My first experience building a skill for Amazon’s Alexa

I was fortunate enough to work on developing my initial skill for Alexa using Amazon’s friendly Trivia Game template today. The guide says one can set it up within an hour which I found to be accurate but excludes the actual authoring of the trivia. This took a little longer and needs some forethought. I decided to set up a Superman Trivia game consisting of 35 questions. Since I’m a big Superman fan, it didn’t take me long to write up all the questions and the corresponding answers. I then proceeded to test the code using Amazon’s developer console. Since the trivia uses the random function in JavaScript, one needs to iterate through the code several times to be able to capture all the questions. It was a very fast iterative process and I started to strike out my list of questions until I got to hear all the questions spoken to me by Alexa. I thought this was a very good QA process as I was able to fix some misspelled words in my trivia. One other particular thing I noticed was that foreign names did not come out right so I was able to change it to a common name that Alexa was able to pronounce more clearly. Lastly, I think Alexa did a good job at speaking out most of the text down to the intonation.

Overall, a great experience and I think years down the road I can look back at this experience with pride as I think Amazon EHCO, Tap or Dot is the next big thing in home automation.