Counting Coach

Inspiration

At the moment Alexa only supports counting from 1 to 10, and a counting skill outside those ranges can be really useful in many time sensitive tasks, making you more productive.

You can be working from home and do a short work out with this skills as your sparring partner (you ask it to count to 10 and do 10 push ups).

You can be practicing a dance routine and have the counting skills be your metronome.

You can be playing with your kids (hide & seek) or teach them the numbers by asking the skill to enunciate them very slowly.

What it does

The skill can count up to a number ("Alexa, ask Counting Coach to count to 10"). Can count between two numbers ("Alexa, tell Counting Coach to count from 10 to 1"). Or can count with a certain pace ("Alexa, ask Counting Coach to count to 3 very slowly").

The pace can be either slow, very slow, fast or very fast. When is slow it'll enunciate each word more clearly and make a longer pause (e.g. you want your children to listen to each number carefully). When it's set to fast, it'll make shorter pauses (e.g. you want a fast set on your workout).

Easter Egg: Try saying "Alexa, ask Counting Coach to count to 10 in whale".

How we built it

We used Amazon Lambda (Node.js) and Amazon Skills Kit.

Challenges we ran into

Getting to know how Alexa Skills are built, since this was our first attempt at something like this. And testing without a device (which neither of us in the team has).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to use a combination of different features to get Alexa to speak the words the way we wanted (prosody for rate of speech, voice effects, good breaks timings to pause, interjections to make it more lively, etc). Even for such a simple skill, using the right features and making the speech more lifelike makes a ton of difference.