Ask Me Anything

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Inspiration

I’m a passionate cyclists. I’ve been cycling since I remember. Bikes were also accompanying me when I was relocating to different places. This gave me unique opportunity to experience differences in trails across United Kingdom, Ireland, Poland, Denmark and Unites States. This was also a great learning opportunity about how some communities are successful in creating amazing trails while other are struggling. One of the important factors I noticed was the availability of the data about who uses these trails and what are their needs. Communities who can use data to build a complete picture of trail-user characteristic tend to be successful with their initiatives in municipalities and city halls. The only problem is how to get these data. Recently I observed how The City of Redmond’s Parks and Recreation Department was running a survey to identify challenges for people with disabilities to use parks and trails - Help make Redmond’s Parks and Trails Accessible for All. Survey can either be filled online or delivered in-person to the Senior Center. This struck me as an inefficient way… What if you could contribute to this great community initiative at the time and place that is convenient for you? This idea pushed me to start looking into how turn Alexa to an active community member who will happily collect your opinions at your home and send them where they can have the biggest impact.

What it does

Ask Me Anything helps you communicate with charity and non-profit organizations and give them data they need to progress or defend their cases. With voice-first surveys people can contribute their opinions in the effortless manner, just as if they had a conversation with someone from their community. Surveys are short and engaging to make sure people can focus on the subject of the survey.

How I built it

I built it by using Alexa.NET library which is an OSS port of Amazon Alexa SDK to .NET platform. Skill together with accompanying site was developed in ASP.NET Core and deployed to Microsoft Azure Web Apps.

Challenges I ran into

By far the biggest challenge was dialog management with c-c-c-combo breakers, which are intents different than the one you are currently handling as dialog. This becomes very challenging when the questions get complicated (e.g. several sub questions). I spent a lot of time on the Amazon Developer Forums to understand this problem better and find workarounds. I even contributed solution I used in my skill (thread “Dialog Model/Interface - dialogState on Launch request / elicit slot as Launch request response?).

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Finding solution to the problem of dialog management with sub questions is what I consider the biggest technical accomplishment. I hope that it will translate to great user experience and high number of opinions which then will be used by charities and nonprofit organizations to have positive impact around us.

What I learned

This is my first Alexa skill so I learned a lot. Starting from how to design for voice though actual implementation and testing to production deployment.

What's next for Ask Me Anything

I’m reaching out to charities and nonprofit organizations to work with them on the surveying projects. I expect I will learn a lot and will need to continue the development to support new requirement for question types and survey authoring experience.

Built With

• asp.net-core
• azure
• c#