Letter Chase

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  Letter Chase

Inspiration

Create a fun, interactive game to play against Alexa

What it does

You play either scored or never ending games against Alexa. You choose a category, such as foods, animals, U.S. cities, movies, actors or sports teams. You then go back and forth - Alexa will say a word/phrase in the category and your word/phrase must start with any of the letters in Alexa's answer.

How I built it

I use AWS Lamda .Net Core project that uses DynamoDB for any needed persistent user data. For the category content used to match against, I needed to come up with as complete of lists as possible and so that took some time compiling the lists.

Challenges I ran into

I needed to come up with a reliable way to handle plural and singular variations without needing to explicitly have every permutation in my lists. Also matching movies, I needed to handle punctuation, special characters, etc.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Figuring out how to handle the user just saying any word or phrase and getting that mapped to the right intent/slot Also, developing a system crowd-source any missing items - so a system to capture not found items and allow for easy addition of valid items into the category lists to constantly improve the lists completeness.

What I learned

That to really understand how users are playing the game, I needed to store the path they took through the application during their sessions.

What's next for Letter Chase

Would like to make a version that incorporates Echo Buttons, so that you can have a local multiplayer game and users try to "buzz in" first to give an answer.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• c#
• dynamodb
• lambda