Alexa Daily Tongue Twister

Summon Alexa and she will recite the tongue twister of the day!

Comment

Inspiration

There are already a lot of 'Word of the Day', 'Fact of the Day' type of skills for Alexa. However, we thought it would be fun to implement it for tongue twisters. These are phrases usually hard to pronounce to humans, but not to Alexa. We believe this is a fun way for users to learn tongue twisters while hearing them more clearly.

What it does

Every day, Alexa will have a new tongue twister for you to practice on (chosen from a pre-made database). Not only can you hear Alexa pronounce them properly (also a bit robotically), but you can also practice by reading

How we built it

We used Javascript to create a lambda function for the Alexa skill. The database of tongue twisters we got it from "http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/en.htm". Using the Alexa API we built the Alexa skill.

Challenges we ran into

It took us 8 hours for the server to say "Hello World" and a lot longer for the Echo Dot to say it. We had to learn how lambda functions work for the AWS Lambda. Alexa took a while to recognise our commands to the skill.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Alexa managed to pronounce the tongue twisters clearly. The whole program runs, despite the little challenges at the beginning.

What we learned

We got to use and experiment with the Echo Dot for the first time. We realised that you should not use reserved or common words for the invocation name for a skill as Alexa will not recognise the skill properly. Most of all, we learned to use the Amazon Web Services, the Alexa API, as well as Javascript.

What's next for Daily Tongue Twister

In the future we would like to increase the database for the tongue twisters. This would in turn allow for different levels of difficulty. One even further step would be to implement this feature in other languages too.

Built With

  • alexa
  • echo-dot
  • http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/en.htm
  • https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/content/fact-skill-1?&sc-channel=gdn&sc-campaign=skill-tutorial&sc-publisher=google&sc-country=uk&sc-medium=gdn-skill-tutorial-google-uk-0007&sc-trackingcode=0007
  • javascript
Share this project:

Updates