Hello-Yoga

"Pose are better than Doses !!" -- Smart Voice Studio

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Inspiration

Amazon Alexa India hosted first ever Amazon Alexa India Hackathon. I participated in it and won second runner up prize. At that time I realized I can do something. I can be part of this revolution. That was the trigger that pulled me into Alexa world. My first goal was to create skill in health and fitness category. I created multiple skills after winning the prize and most of them were on health and fitness. I created skills for kids' health and fitness. and I see there is a lot of opportunity in this category(Kids- Health and fitness). I started exploring activities and finally decided to work on Yoga and Meditation. I have created yoga skills for kids but it is hard for kids to get the best out of it when it is Voice only. It is hard to follow instruction. This whole learning experience helped me look deeper into how can we make more engaging skill for kids under Health and Fitness category. That was a learning or what I call in inspiration for all the efforts I am pulling in to design and develop "Hello-Yoga".

What it does

"Hello-Yoga" helps kids practice Yoga poses which can help them increase strength, flexibility and coordination. Because kids might face difficulties with hard to do yoga poses, we have provided three difficulty levels to choose from. That is "Easy, Medium and Hard". Once difficulty is selected, kids will see sequence of Yoga poses with Image and Name. It helps them understand and visualize how it is going to look like when performed. Once done, kids have options to choose other yoga poses or change difficulty level.

How we built it

It all started with the skill that we built few months back. Intent was to get kids used to health activities. Provided features were Yoga poses, mindful breathing and one guided meditation. As it was Voice only, we did not see more engagement. So we decided to implement APL and do everything from scratch. We first planned to include Yoga poses, activities around health & fitness and guided meditation. But because of technical difficulties we only went ahead with Yoga poses for now. Skill is built in NodeJS language includes APL, dynamoDB database and S3 integrations. We have provided completely different visual experience for Round and Landscape hubs.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges that we faced were dynamoDB integrations, implementations of APL transformers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Now it is going to be easy for kids to perform Yoga poses with mind-blowing visual experience.

What we learned

It is not at all easy to implement all that we have mentioned. We felt the heat only when we joined the development ground. Overall it was really a great learning experience. We made mistakes, we changed skill flow, we designed and developed again and again to achieve something that kids will LOVE.

What's next for Hello-Yoga

As our dying wish, we had all plans to provide guided meditations specifically designed for kids and created by Professional guided meditation instructors/trainers/coach. We have the meditations files ready provided by one of the well known Guided meditation coach who is expert in designing very magical and effective guided meditations for kids. So even during certification period, we will keep developing mentioned functionality for the best of Kids' health.

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