When Alexa met Willie

You know you can ask Alexa to send a text to a number... how cool is that!

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Inspiration

At K-State Hackathon, 2016 we are using Amazon Echo to send text message to a number which as per our knowledge has not yet been done by any one.

What it does

  1. Send text message to a phone number. [Done]
  2. Talk to Willie, the Wildcat and know more about K-State and Hack-K-State.

How we built it

  1. We used Alexa Skill Kit to send request to our web service end-point running on an Amazon Lambda which in turn invokes the Twilio API to send text message to a phone number.

Challenges we ran into

  • Thinking and designing a voice-interface which is very new for us (though not good enough)
  • Importing and using twillio REST API for python in Amazon Lambda
  • Creating and uploading a zip with all the code to Lambda every time we make a change

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Alexa can now send text, cool right! Also, Alexa can talk to Willie and give you some details about K-Sate.

What we learned

  1. Alexa Skill Kit
  2. Twilio API
  3. Amazon Lambda

What's next for Alexa, you know you can X

Integrate with users address book so we do not have to yell the numbers. Allow the application to use individual registered twilio account. Sending text was just the starting, make Alexa do more stuff.

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