Baby Words

Inspiration

I wanted to submit a project that Surabhi and I could work together on but we were having trouble coming up with ideas. I imagined Surabhi and me as working adults in the future who had a child and an Alexa..., "How would I like our child to use Alexa? What would be a good use for a baby or young child?" Most of those who have interacted with young children know that children tend to associate specific phrases when they see certain stimuli and they babble these sentences very cutely. I thought it would be adorable if we had an Alexa skill that gave cute definitions to children so that they would share them for our parental joy. Thus, Baby Words :)

What it does

The child will hear a definition that describes the vocabulary word Alexa is looking for in a way that paints a picture in the child's mind. This is intended to help with creating associations faster.

How we built it

Amazon's online Alexa portal and AWS Lambda.

Challenges we ran into

At first, we didn't know how to accomplish the flow of control and logic we had in mind. Several tutorials and hours of debugging and experimenting later, we have Baby Words, designed exactly as we pictured!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Going from not knowing how to do this skill to making it exactly as we envisioned is amazing. Persisting through issues and not giving up and the knowledge we gained along the way is nice.

The best part is that this is the first project Surabhi and Vivek built together!

What we learned

Tutorials are our friend. Experimenting is the best way to figure out how things work. Don't give up. No matter how complicated your imagination is, what you imagine can be created exactly with code :O

What's next for Baby Words

Add more vocabulary lists!

Images

The pictures enclosed demonstrate basic use of the skill, giving a correct answer, asking for help, and Alexa's response to an incorrect answer (the skill was in development during this submission).

Built With

• amazon-alexa
• javascript
• lambda