Inspiration
We were inspired by the mobile app Chwazi which provides a convenient way to pick random teams or a random person to go first. We thought this would be a great skill to add to Alexa to assist the millions of people that play board games at home.
What it does
GameBot solves several common problems that come up while playing board games. Including: splitting up players into random teams, picking who goes first, tracking individual and team scores, and rolling dice.
How I built it
We built GameBot using the Alexa Developer Console, Node.js AWS Lambda function, and AWS DynamoDB.
Challenges I ran into
The biggest challenges we ran into involved limitations in the Alexa developer tools. For example: matching possessive names isn't currently supported, and matching a list of words/names can be difficult. Sometimes, we needed to make compromises in how the user should interact with the skill because of these issues.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We're proud of the skill we created and our ability to overcome technical problems we faced during its development.
What I learned
We learned a lot about general Alexa development, the new Alexa Developer Console, and AWS while building this project.
What's next for GameBot
We hope GameBot catches on with the board game community and we can continue to add convenient and helpful board game utilities based on user requests.
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