Green your Space

The first meaningful step in any process is the step where you gather knowledge about what you plan on doing. And any changes that can be made at home, will have a large effect in enough numbers. Alexa provides the right medium for anyone interested, even casually, in making planet-friendly changes at home. A 1-minute session could be the start of a much more purposeful attempt to reduce your carbon footprint.

The skill is a fairly simple one. Any home-owner can activate it, specify a portion of the house, and listen to Alexa list out small changes that can be made there, to do their bit to save the environment.

I used the Storyline tool. I'm not into coding, and Storyline reduces making skills into a question of ideas.

I had to figure out the best way to divide the potential changes into categories, that the user could conveniently pick from, for changes they could make. I settled on it being according to rooms. The options, though more relevant in the U.S., had to be useful for people outside the U.S. too.

Not sure, this counts as an accomplishment. But using recorded audio to enhance the user xp, was a breakthrough in terms of how the skill sounded to me. It made it more unique, and something users were likely to look forward to using repeatedly.

Though I can't point out any technical improvements I've made to my skill building, the use of the recorded voice was a breakthrough in terms of user xp.

Expansion. Add more items to each room, perhaps be more specific. Tune the dialogue to be more personal perhaps. Add a diary section, where users can share changes they've made, that could be heard by fellow users to inspire more action.

Built With

• storyline