Heroes Quiz

Launch Page
MIchael Phelps
Barack Obama
Brad Pitt
Bill Gates
Beyonce
Right answer
Wrong answer
Final page

Inspiration

Growing up all of us had our real life heroes, heroes we looked up to, heroes who made us believe in ourselves, heroes who defied all odds to be who they are. Heroes Quiz is a tribute to all these American Greats who inspire millions with the work they do. The Phelps and the Jordans of the world that show that nothing is impossible.

What it does

The idea is pretty simple, Alexa asks you three questions about your real life hero? For example to get to Michael Phelps

Alexa: What is your hero's profession?

User : Athlete/Swimmer

Alexa: What is your hero's age?

User : Thirty Five

Alexa: Which state was your hero born in? Maryland

User : Maryland

Then Alexa guesses the name of your hero.

Alexa: I think your hero is Michael Phelps

Alexa then plays a video on your hero's life. To test how much you know about your hero, Alexa asks 5 multiple choice questions (with four options) from your heros life. Here is the catch the video that the user sees is generated by an Artificial Intelligence and the questions that the user answers are also generated using advanced Natural Language Processing techniques.

Alternatively, everyday Alexa picks a new hero as the "Hero of the day", in this segment the users may get to know about someone who they haven't heard of before and get inspired by them.

Heroes Quiz currently supports these 5 professions:

Athletes
Actors
Entrepreneurs
Politicians
Singers

Here is a list of all the heros (links to videos included)

How we built it

We leveraged the power of Alexa Conversations to build the first part of the game. Conditional APLA response rendering has been used to handle API failures i.e. in an event that Alexa is not able to guess your hero, the api returns a FAILURE status. Also If the user gets the state or age wrong, they can change one of the slots (via the context carry over functionality). The visual part of the skill is built using APL 1.4. We have used Alexa layouts to get a uniform visual experience across all devices.The Video component uses AlexaTransportControls for the pause/play functionality. The TouchWrapper component is used along with the sequencer to work with touch enabled devices. The data is stored inside json files categorised by profession in the hosted lambda.

Challenges we ran into

Debugging Alexa Conversations Errors
We had to develop the skill in two halves as the AXC model takes a lot of time to train
Designing APL Docs
Designing an architecture that enables communication between the nodejs backend for video generation, the python backend and lambda hosted Alexa backend
Video Generation and Machine Learning are 2 very CPU intensive tasks, we had to deploy seperate digital ocean servers to make 37 videos
Using version control on multiple repositories

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Going from having zero knowledge on how to create an Alexa Skill to successfully creating an Alexa skill that uses Alexa Conversations to do something meaningful. Also we were able to create an algorithm that takes any wikipedia article, summarises it and makes a video out of it within minutes. (5 minutes max)

What we learned

ASK SDK and using the Alexa Developer Console
Using Alexa Conversations to develop the future of voice
Using context carry over along with conditional responses
The Alexa Presentation Language and various components like the Pager, Sequencer, TouchWrapper and Containers
The "when" clause while rendering APL & APLA documents to work well on all kinds of Alexa Devices
Using NLP to generate questions from wikipedia text
Text Summarisation using transformers pipelines
Working with GraphicsMagic to create and resize images
Working with ffmpeg to combine images to form a video
Setting up a REST API using Flask and Python
MVC pattern in node js to write clean code
Premier Pro for editing videos

What's next for Heroes Quiz

The quiz currently supports real life heros only, we plan to add more heroes and include reel life heros as well, we also plan to improve the quality of the AI generated videos and add animations to make the skill more interactive.