Kid´s Zoo

Inspiration

I wished to build skill that interesting, engaging and funny in same time for kids. I started with 10 ideas, some of them could take too much time some of were not so interesting. So i stopped on skill with animal sounds.

What it does

1. Kid´s Zoo knows animals sounds and can play sound for. Unlike to other similar skills I took bigger number of animals over 140 and real sounds of them, not just imitation with Alexa voice.
2. It has some type of context. So you can repeat last animal sound with frase like "Again" or "Repeat". Also play next animal sound by asking "Next" or "Another animal"

How I built it

I used ubuntu server as infrastructure, PostgreSQL to store some data, Python/Django, Nginx, Gunicron.

Challenges I ran into

Most challenging was to find enough animals, there sounds, names and synonyms in english and german languages. I wrote small program to convert audio clips for correct format accepted by Alexa, and another one to built custom slot for Alexa with animals in english and german languages.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The speed of implementation, it took 3 days.

What I learned

I was impressed how many different sounds are in nature. Most of them a really funny =) Giant Panda sound the best!

What's next for Kid´s Zoo

• add images of animals
• add short information about each animal
• upgrade skill for Echo Show and use images and short information when user request some animal sound
• also add new intent to request summary and interesting facts about animal

Built With

• django
• gunicorn
• postgresql
• python
• ubuntu
• wikipedia