About us
We're software developers from Australia and owners of a startup called Aurita. We're also proud fathers and enjoy creating software for our kids and other children around the world.
Inspiration
Wanting to help entertain and engage kids with something creative was the main motivator for developing our skill. Alexa finally coming to Australia gave us the chance to do so.
What it does
Our Crazy Stories skill involves Alexa asking a child for their input to help build personalized short stories. Alexa will ask questions in a fun interview style approach and the journey is often just as fun as the final result. Numerous sound effects are used for greater immersion and Alexa will often use the answers provided in ways kids aren't expecting. We find kids have more fun and are more engaged when the heroes and villains of a story consist of friends and family for example. As the skill is conversational in nature, no special commands (intents) need to be learned by kids in advance.
How we built it
We built the skill whilst learning how Alexa skill definitions work and what level of coding was required. Our first tasks were to verify that our overall idea was technically feasible and to see if the draft execution showed promise for engaging kids. As creating an Alexa skill requires a lot of field testing with many different users, much time and effort went into that task as well. Technically, we used the Alexa Skills Kit with Node.js and AWS Lambda, along with Amazon S3 storage for hosting all our sound effects.
Challenges we ran into
The published sample code and documentation was not a great fit for our idea and what we needed the skill to do. Our skill is more of a journey than a brief transaction, and with many valid single-word responses, it's hard for Alexa to provide any context for what a user says. Related to this, a significant disadvantage in our conversational type of skill is that Alexa can be interrupted too easily, and when this occurs no additional information is provided.
Finally, it took some time for us to find the right balance between custom code and standard Alexa configuration.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're pleased to have gained a solid understanding on how to construct Alexa skills and to appreciate the extensive challenges presented. We're proud that we managed to improve our skill until the kids were having genuine fun.
What we learned
Developing for Alexa and conversations presents some interesting challenges. For this emerging technology, both the balancing of ideas against today's technical capabilities, and the breadth of testing required, seems even more demanding when compared to more traditional forms of software development.
What's next for Crazy Stories
Continuous improvement based on user feedback and further testing. Also, adding further content and supporting more languages.
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