Alexa Hangman: for Echo Show and others

The classic hangman game, on your favorite smart home device, for your smart kids

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Inspiration

There are already a few hangman game skills in Alexa skill store. Why bother creating one more? This Alexa Hangman game is not your ordinary hangman game skill. It is designed for the new Alexa devices with screens, Echo Show and Echo Spot. Since the skill is for kids, it is more fun and educational, even a dictionary is included!

What it does

Smooth Start

  • It works like our favorite classic hangman game. You don't have to learn the game because you already know it! Easy.

Game Progress Reporting

  • On Echo Show and Echo Spot, it displays the progress of the game (the known and unknown letters, and the hangman figure) on the screen.
  • On good ol' Alexa devices like Echo, it verbally reports your progress when you say "progress"

Educational Features

  • There are various categories of vocabularies, like food, travel, shopping, etc for your kids to choose from, which makes the game more engaging.
  • When the game ends, you can say "dictionary" to look for the definition of the word, so that the kids can learn by playing.

How I built it

  • The skill uses Amazon Lambda to run. The program generates a word and wait for users' voice input of one letter each time. Track the progress using session variables.
  • The skill fetches the corresponding hand-drawn hangman figure from Amazon S3 and display it alongside the word-guessing progress on the screen of Echo Show.
  • For the dictionary function, API from WordNik is used. The API provides word definition and others from multiple dictionaries.

Challenges I ran into

  • Display Interface is relatively new to me. It took a while to make the display look exactly like what I wanted.
  • Another tricky part was that some voice input didn't appear like what I expected. For example, if you say "i", letter "i" is interpreted as "I" (capitalized) by Alexa, which caused some trouble.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm glad that this skill can fully utilize the power of the display interface of Echo Show and friends. The screen can really bring a more engaging Alexa experience especially for kids. The feeling is more concrete if you have something to look at, just as how I hope this version of hangman game skill can illustrate.

What's next for Alexa Hangman: for Echo Show and others

  • Add more vocabularies in case the kids are addicted to the game. The skill should not disappoint them.
  • Improve the overall flow and user experience.
  • It is an open source project on GitHub! Feel free to contribute by leaving comments, fixing bugs or adding new features.
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