iHeartRadio Amazon Alexa Skill

Inspiration

The idea of incorporating Amazon Alexa and another API was definitely daunting. Despite this, we definitely saw the potential for growth as programmers.

What it does

The skill simply takes in an iHeartRadio account (by email address not by userID), calls the iHeartRadio API, parses the json, and tells the user what type of account they have. (Free, premium, etc...).

How we built it

We implemented a two way transfer of API data, from the data base of the IHeartMedia, analyzed the data and sent it back through the Amazon Alexa.

Challenges we ran into

Originally our idea was to implement a system where a user would stream an iheartradio station. After each song it would then ask the user whether they wanted it in their account's playlist or not. This quickly became a problem when we noticed the instructions for getting the userID and sessionID were incorrect. The reason this was a problem was many of the APIs that iHeartRadio provides, take these IDs as parameters. This meant that we were very limited in what we could actually make our amazon skill do.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We incorporated APIs into Amazon Alexa skills! This is something we were incredibly new to, having not touched APIs or Amazon Alexa skills prior to this Hackathon. Our code is versatile in the sense that it scales well for any other future API.

What we learned

We learned the uses of and improved upon our skills with :curl, APIs, command line, git, node.js and Alexa skill creation. This being our first hackathon, we did not really know what to expect. We learned that things will likely not go as initially planned, but being able to bounce back and work with what we are given is important.

What's next for iHeartRadio Amazon Alexa Skill

Our Amazon Alexa skill is basically only a demo. We would still love to incorporate our original idea, given that we are able to retreive userIDs and sessionIds

Built With

• api
• javascript