Dangerous Aussie Animals

Find out about the most dangerous Australian animals from deadly jellyfish to killer snakes, spiders & sharks.

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Inspiration

Living in Australia for the last 10 years, many people ask about the dangerous and deadly animals that live here. While the descriptions of these animals are great for education, I think the visual elements on multimodal will add another dimension to this skill.

What it does

Users can ask for a random animal or a specific animal by name or category. They will then get a description of this animal and can then follow up with questions about first aid if you encounter one or the habitats it lives in. All of this information is also shown on the screen with an image of the animal.

Supplemental questions handled are being able to ask for the top 3, 5 or 10 dangerous animals.

How I built it

I started by researching the new APL documentation to see what would be possible. I then sketched out some basic layouts for the home, animal and list screens to be used in the skill.

Once I was happy with the basic UI and how it would work across the various device sizes I then researched the animals and bought suitable royalty free imagery for each animal that would really show them off on the devices.

From there I built a JSON payload for the animals, started building the Lambda function, uploaded my images to an S3 bucket and coded the APL templates and continued to test and develop the skill.

Challenges I ran into

There is a lot to learn in the APL documentation and the timeline over the festive period was quite challenging but I feel that I have a good skill which works well for a V1 and has scope to build. The biggest challenge was probably adapting layouts for the Echo Spot as it is so different to the other screen layouts.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud to have built a skill that I think is educational, entertaining and makes good use of the screens, there is still a lot of scope to build on and develop the skill beyond the initial hackathon release.

What I learned

A lot about APL, there were some massive learnings there.

What's next for Dangerous Aussie Animals

  • Add more animals
  • Add more than one image for each
  • Allow users to tap on images to see a larger version
  • Allow users to tap on a list item to see and hear the full details for that animal
  • Add sounds or video for relevant animals
  • Information on the different types of toxins animals have
  • Random short trivia snippets on dangerous animals

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