Guess The Animal

When you start guess the animal with an Echo Show, you play with 10 animals.
You can upgrade your experience by choosing to buy an Animal Pack, just say, "Alexa, what can I buy?"
You get an explanation of the Animal Pack and choose if you'd like to buy it.
You can choose which animal pack to play from by asking, "what did I buy?".
If you own an animal pack and restart the game, you'll be prompted to guess from this animal pack.

Inspiration

When driving in the car with my children, this is the game that stops the fights, quiets them down and brings on the mental battles. What a perfect voice app, we all love animals.

What it does

Guess the animal challenges you to listen to the clues and guess the correct animal. I launched the app in 2016 without ISP and it did really well. The latest launch introduces Animal-Packs, groups of 20 questions for animals from a particular region that expand the number and variety of animals available for Guess The Animal.

How I built it

I learned Node.js, learned how to set up an AWS Lambda service to integrate with a custom Alexa app, utilized the Alexa v2 SDK, integrated with AWS S3 for picture hosting and integrated with Alexa In Skill Purchases. I created purchasable In-Skill Products and linked them to my skill.

Challenges I ran into

The Alexa team makes it pretty easy to create a skill and hook it up to the AWS Lambda function. It was a little challenging setting up the display templates to work with the new Alexa screen enabled apps.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

When I first launched the app, it reached 40,000 unique users in 30 days. It was amazing how many people could play guess the animal with no distribution efforts on my part.