Flash Quiz

Inspiration

My niece and nephew started a new school in elementary and were trying to find new ways to study for their STEM classes. With busy parents it can be hard sometimes to dedicate the time needed to help them with studying. I thought, what if Alexa could store their questions and answers and then run them through a quiz in a similar flash card method.

What it does

Flash Quiz enables customizable flash cards to be read back to you. You can hold these flash cards in various decks and you can add as many cards as you like. The cards are created all with voice commands so there is no need for a separate app or having to use some pre-defined flash card question bank.

How I built it

I created this Alexa skill in a serverless manner on Lambda. I also, utilized some of the advanced features like memory persistence, dialog management (delegate.dialog), and phrase slots. I built this tool utilizing the public-beta of the Alexa Skills Kit SDK for Python.

Challenges I ran into

There is one challenge I ran into while creating this skill. I realized if the answer to a flash card is a sentence, a user may say a sentence with a similar meaning, but not exact word-for-word as the stored answer and it would be marked incorrect. In the future, I hope to implement Natural Language Processing (NLP) of the input stream and answer text to create a better experience for these similar answers.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud that I was able to utilize some of these advanced features and that I was able to finish this skill fairly quickly.

What I learned

This was my first Alexa skill so figuring out how to interact with an application with your voice was a huge lesson. Language is so complex and no two people speak the same. Luckily, Alexa helps normalize some of that as well as using a large number of intent utterances.

What's next for Flash Quiz

• I would like to implement some NLP into the questions • I need to figure out a good way to make up the cost for the memory persistence, so thinking about ads or in-app purchases • A Website to manually input flashcards and bulk-edit them.

Built With

• amazon-alexa
• amazon-dynamodb
• amazon-lambda
• ask-sdk
• python2.7