Alexa Accessibility

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  Some workflows

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  Emergency Contact flow

Inspiration

Home voice assistants have the ability to support our lives in a myriad of ways. People with specific accessibility needs have the potential to receive targeted support through these assistants. We aimed to create an Alexa skill that serves those who are part of the accessibility community and have needs in their home that could be supported by voice technology.

AI applications that use voice commands are able to help people with disabilities by sending messages, storing information such as important reminders, automate appliances in the home (Vieira et al., 2022).

Especially as older adults and individuals with disabilities are vulnerable populations, we found that adding safety applications would be useful to include in our Alexa skill.

What it does

Safety Checks Our Alexa skill performs safety checks when users enter, leave and go to bed. This includes reminders to lock the door, turn off kitchen appliances, and close windows. Users are also able to record and recall where they left their keys so they may easily access them when needed. Our emergency workflow allows the user to call their emergency contact or alert the authorities if they feel unsafe.

Tasks We included functionality that assists users in completing routine tasks. Our make a sandwich workflow guides users through the steps to creating a sandwich. We also created a phone call intent so users can easily contact whomever they wish.

How we built it

We built our Alexa Skill using the VoiceFlow application.

Challenges we ran into

We were challenged when attempting to figure out the intents function and ensure that a variety of voice responses worked correctly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have completed this research project and created an Alexa Skill that is helpful to those with accessibility needs.

What's next for Alexa Accessibility

We aim to expand the utterances, intents, and overall instances so there is a larger variety of what users can say and receive help with.

Built With

• voiceflow