Inspiration
The Glasgow Subway is great for getting around, and normally runs pretty well. Though as on any form of public transport you want to be able to check for disruptions.
What it does
The Glasgow Subway Alexa skill can therefore help make your journey smoother, alleviating stress before you even set off. To help with those late night journeys, the skill also lets you check when the last train is - making sure you know when it's time to find an alternative route from the offset rather than at the closed station.
How I built it
The Alexa skill runs on a Python back-end hosted on AWS. The Alexa skill invokes the lambda function, which in turn returns the necessary response. To handle station and subway line requests, slot filling has been used.
Challenges I ran into
Developing using Amazon Presentation Language provides opportunities to add multi-modality to the user interaction. In the case of this skill, this is an excellent addition as user can be alerted to disruptions with visuals. However, starting out relatively new to APL, it has also at times been difficult to render the display as I wanted to show.
What I learned
APL. Based on the challenge of APL outlined above, I have spent a significant amount of time looking at tutorials and documentation in order to tweak the output to display as intended. This has also resulted in a more robust understanding of the language.
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