Dr Speech

Dr Speech aims to help people who speak English as a 2nd language to improve the accuracy of their pronunciation.

Comment

Inspiration

This skill is inspired by the interaction between Alexa and me. As a non-native English speaker, I found it challenging at times to tell or ask Alexa for different commands or questions because of my accent. I found that Alexa will be my perfect speech therapist at home who can constantly correct my pronunciation whenever I interact with her. This skill can benefit a large population of people whose native language is anything but English.

The cost to have a one-on-one speech therapist section is expensive (Average cost $150-200 per hour). With Alexa who speaks perfect American English, correcting your foreign accent and improving your speaking can now be both affordable and fun!

What it does

Dr Speech is designed to help people who speak English as a second language to improve the accuracy of their pronunciation.

How I built it

I use JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS for the front end, mocha and chai for the testing, and Node.js and Amazon Web Service for the backend. I also built this skill from scratch based on Amazon Alexa "Hello World" sample code.

Challenges I ran into

  • Thinking as many as utterances as i could
  • Its challenging to debug some of the issues it came up

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Our Team only have two people and we were able to build this skill from scratch in one night using the simple "Hello World" sample code from Amazon.

What I learned

  • The differences between using custom slot type vs AMAZON.LITERAL
  • Session Object
  • Lambda function

What's next for Dr Speech

  • Add more features which include integration with third party API
Share this project:

Updates