Inspiration
Contemplation, versus meditation, where you spend some time thinking about how to add more health, happiness, and positive energy to you life is very important to me. I wanted to offer people the opportunity to spend some part of their day simply thinking about their life and noticing their actions. The Better Day skill is designed to do that.
What it does
This is an Alexa Skill. The user asks Alexa to give it a 'Better Day' contemplation. One of my pre-recorded audio files is played to the user. The user can then spend the day thinking about the contemplation or suggestion.
How I built it
I used the Alexa AWS CLI 'ask' toolset. I wrote AWS node.js Lamba code and used the Alexa json configuration files.
Challenges I ran into
The system took a long time to play an audio from AWS S3. I addressed this challenge by having the skill use the Alexa text-to-speech ability to play an introduction while the audio file is getting fetched.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I got the system to work. The playing an audio from S3 was not something I had done before with Alexa. Also, recording the files took some effort, technically.
What I learned
The whole process - from building the a skill that uses S3 to creating a method for generating audio files was new to me.
What's next for A Better Day
I will continue to add new audio files to keep the content fresh.
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