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Inspiration

Being our first ever app we wanted to combine many functionalities while still making something catchy and innovative.

What it does

It is both a skill for Alexa that challenges you to recognize some of the world's most iconic places just by a (more or less) vague description and a text message game with the same functionality but which doesn't require and internet connection on the phone. The later was implemented through the Twilio API.

How we built it

We have used a piece of open source code from Krishnaraj Varma (https://github.com/krvarma/Amazon-Echo-and-Twilio) that allowed us to send text messages via Alexa which we have then altered to allows us to start the game on the phone by sending a text message to the target client. We have extended the code further to implement the interactive version of the game so you Alexa can ask you questions and you can respond.

Challenges we ran into

Being new to Alexa and especially JavaScript it was difficult at first to make sense of the code and understand it well enough so we can model it to our advantage. Also debugging on AWS was a bit of a pain.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are definitely proud of what we managed to achieve in such a short timeframe given the fact that none of us had done this before.

What we learned

I would say we all learned a great deal not only about JavaScript, Python and how they use libraries to implement awesome functionalities but also about development on AWS.

What's next for Enigma

Enigma 2.0 should find better strategies of implementing the question/answer part using maybe a decision tree structure , maybe make it work for many clients and add many different questions about different locations around the world while still keeping the informative aspect.