Folktales
A conversational storyteller skill for Alexa & Google Assistant
Inspiration
As kids, we grew up listening to folktales and various other bed-time stories. We often used to ask our parents/grandparents to tell us a princess story or a dragon story and they would oblige. We realised that not many get to have this wonderful experience and hence we created this application.
What it does
It tells you a folktale based on your query. Suppose you want to hear a tale about a princess, you can ask folktales this,
"Tell me a _ princess _ story"
Or if dragons are your fancy ask folktales this,
"Tell me a _ dragon _ story"
Or if you don't have anything particular in mind just ask,
"Tell me a story"
How we built it
We build a server-less function on AWS Lambda to serve as the backend for both Alexa and Google Assistant. We used ElasticSearch's full-text query to fetch stories relevant to the user's request. Finally, we used Amazon's DynamoDB to persist user information and to give the user a unique story each time.
Challenges we ran into
Setting up the AWS with the VPCs and VPC endpoints took up sometime as there was a learning curve. To get the user query was also a roadblock as we had difficulty building the intent schema with AMAZON.LITERAL.
What we learned
We learned about AWS services like VPC, Lambda, DynamoDB and of course Alexa Skills Kit & DialogFlow.
What's next for Folktales
We hope to extend Folktales' capabilities where it will be able to come up with auto-generated folktale-like stories.
Source
All folktales are obtained from the public domain source Multilingual FolkTale Database http://mftd.org
Built With
- amazon-alexa
- amazon-api-gateway
- amazon-ec2
- amazon-web-services
- api.ai
- dialogflow
- dynamodb
- elasticsearch
- javascript
- lambda
- node.js
- vpc
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