County

• 

  Home page

• 

  Counting in Japanese

Inspiration

My 3 year old son wanted Alexa to tell him how to count to ten in another language. But she couldn't do it. I knew about this skill challenge, so I figured I'd give it a go.

What it does

County can show you how to count to ten in a variety of languages. On devices with screens, it shows touchable flags and shows the numbers and written-out text for each number as it counts.

It's not quite through the skill certification process, but the skill ID is amzn1.ask.skill.e220ac20-8c57-49ee-8657-fb33da45b6d9.

How I built it

I used the Alexa Skills Kit for Node and AWS Lambda to build the skill. I built a set of APL documents and used commands like SpeakItem, SendEvent, and SetPage to manage the user interaction and counting actions.

Challenges I ran into

When I was most of the way through building the skill, I ran into a bug in the Alexa service. When assembling a Sequential command set that would run SetPage and SpeakItem commands to read each number, I found that Alexa would read the first number and then stop.

I searched the forums, and found another person who had hit a similar problem. I provided code and details of my issue and, after plenty of troubleshooting, determined that it was caused by two separate bugs in Alexa. An Amazon rep filed the two bugs and promised (also via email) that he'd try to get them fixed before the hackathon deadline.

Unfortunately, I didn't hear back after that, but I was surprised when today (a few weeks after filing), the behavior is now fixed (at least in the simulator). So I put the finishing touches on the skill and submitted for certification.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of building a full multi-modal skill. I was able to learn APL and SSML, and get a much clearer idea of how the Alexa interaction model works.

What I learned

As I mentioned before, I was excited to learn about APL and SSML. It was also fun to learn some of the AWS CLI functions so I could setup deployment scripts in my project rather than manually uploading through the Lambda portal.

What's next for County

Once approved, I'll likely spend some time adding more languages (Italian is next). I'd also like to give it a spit-shine on Echo Spot devices.

Built With

• alexa
• apl
• lambda
• node.js