Does It Fly? (Chidiya Udd)

It's based on an Indian folk game "Chidiya Udd" with the purpose of helping kids learn which birds & animals can fly.

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Inspiration

As an Indian, I too like most of us played the Indian folk game called Chidiya Udd in my childhood. Countless moments of my childhood were spent playing this simple yet awesome game. It is one of the most adored games ever. It is a game that no one ever grows too old to play and also, one that none can be too tired of playing. So, to relish my favorite childhood challenge and bring it to more people of different locales, I decided to make an Alexa Skill around this game.

What it does

Does It Fly? - A game based on the popular Indian folk game "Chidiya Udd", meaning, Does Bird Fly? with the purpose of helping kids learn which birds & animals can fly.

Now in this skill, Alexa will ask you a question, and you have to tell whether the asked animal or bird or object flies or not. You have to respond with a Yes or No. If you are able to answer all of them correctly, you win, else Alexa wins. If you respond incorrectly, you lose and Alexa will greet you with the asked animal's or bird's sound and tell you how many you got correctly.

Alexa will also give you fun facts within the companion app about the asked animal along with the sound they make to continue the learning.

And if you just want to know what sound does the animal makes, you can ask the skill for "What does the (animal's/bird's name) say" to hear the sound they make. If you want to hear any other animal's sound, ask again, or to start playing the "Does It Fly?" game just tell Alexa your name.

How I built it

  1. Created an Alexa Skill in the Alexa Skill Builder portal and define the interaction models as well as the intent schema. This sets up the framework for the behavior of the skill.
  2. Created an AWS Lambda function that interfaces with the Amazon Alexa and translates the various intents into requests that can be passed on.

Challenges I ran into

The Ideation part was what was the most challenging to me. Trying to figure out, what would be the best way to represent this folk game as an Alexa skill while keeping in mind that the kids interacting with the skill would find it engaging and learn something from interacting with it as well. Another challenge was finding different public use animal/bird/object sounds for this skill, which was quite tough and tedious process. Being relatively new to Alexa Skill Development, I also faced a lot of challenges that a rookie developer is likely to face. Thanks to developer forums, Alexa's unofficial slack channel, and lots of brainstorming and fiddling around the Internet, I was finally able to overcome the challenges I have run into till now.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of & What I learned

I started learning about Alexa a month back. And I found that making new skills and tackling problems whenever I run into them, was the best way to learn rather than first reading documentation completely. I learned a lot in the process of building this skill. I had to learn how to use cards, speechicons, session attributes, state handlers, audio etc. which I thought to be relatively tough before using them in this project. I also had to learn how to edit and design the logos and different sounds, which was a new experience for me but is now another very useful addition to my skill set.

What's next for Does It Fly? (Chidiya Udd)

I have several updates planned for this game if this version is well received. The major upgrade that Does It Fly? will receive is it being implemented with Alexa Gadgets SDK and Gadgets Skill API to make this game available for Echo Buttons. The Alexa Gadgets SDK and Gadgets Skill API is not currently publicly available to use and will be released in the coming days. This will bring back the original essence of the traditional folk game, which involves players raising their finger whenever the question is about a flying object and keeping it pressed down when the question is about a non-flying object. The same can be implemented beautifully with Echo Buttons and this skill will then be made available on Alexa platform in all its glory.

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