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

• javascript
• node.js
• elasticsearch
• vpc
• amazon-web-services
• lambda
• api.ai
• dynamodb
• amazon-ec2
• amazon-alexa
• amazon-api-gateway
• dialogflow