Inspiration
Inspired by a TED talk from Shawn Achor, my wife came up with the idea to support positive vibes in our family. Over dinner everyone had to tell at least 3 positive moments of their day. This simple technique helped to make our dinners so much more fun.
What it does
Happy Moments boosts your happiness by focusing on the positive moments in your life:
- Launch the skill and tell happiness coach Lexana your very own happy moments
- Whenever you feel sad or need some super powers, start Happy Moments and ask for a happiness boost
- Coach Lexana reminds you of your very own happy moments
Compared to all the other affirmation skills available, Happy Moments actually tracks your very own moments and supports positive thinking by providing your happiest moments instead of random quotes.
How I built it
There were three major parts to this project: Research, Development and Testing
Research:
- Read a lot about positive thinking and self improvement
- Attended Alexa Dev Day Berlin to learn about new features of the Alexa platform
Development:
- Created object model for users, moments and sessions
- Scribbled interaction model and defined intents and utterances with the Interaction Builder
- Coded the backend in Node.js and MongoDB
Testing:
- While coding I used the Alexa Test Simulator which helped a lot to speed up my workflow
- Most important was testing on an actual device
Challenges I ran into
- When I tested the skill on a real device, it wasn't able to reliably record my moments, so I had to throw away my carefully designed intents and find a workaround
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
- I found a reliable solution for recording user moments
- I wrote an algorithm that transforms first person sentences to second person sentences
What's next for Happy Moments
There's some space for improvement and I have a lot of ideas, but these are most important:
- It's a single user skill right now, but it could also make sense for whole families
- Let users search for previously recorded moments
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