Make it work

Inspiration

Focusing on a task for a specific amount of time is a true ordeal these days and our phones and computers are still our main sources of distraction. We realized it would be really nice to use our Echo to make a skill that will track our activity and make us focus on the task at hand. Since it’s hand free, it helped us a lot with our work as I could just yell out to get the work session started.

What it does

Our skill starts with the long intro that we have prepared for the first time users. The skill tells them how they can use and what it is. Then the user is presented with options to select her background noise and session duration. Once the entire setup is done, the user can label that setup so that he can use it later on. There is also an option to change the settings the user has set. We store this data so that whenever the user comes back, she won’t have to go through the entire process of setup but can get to her session right away

The entire experience has been done by a professional voice actor to give our skill a fun persona. From our earlier experiences, we have learned the importance of a real human voice as opposed to a machine one.

How I built it

We have first come up with a strategy to develop the skill and created a flow diagram of all the actions. Following this flow diagram, we created each step bit by bit to cover all the actions. We also had to hire the voice actress and convert the voice files into an acceptable format that can be played on Alexa.

Challenges I ran into

The hardest part was the streaming issue. Since we are using at least 30 minute long sessions, we had to delve into the nitty-gritty of how we can get this working. Normally applications don’t have this which made it harder for us to come up on our own just following the guidelines.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Streaming and the persona

What I learned

The most important lesson for us for the features that should be dropped with the user feedback we received. We also learned the importance of human voice once again when we did a user-testing session with a number of people. The feedback for the human voice was overwhelmingly positive.

What's next for Make it work

We are planning to keep the stats of every user and create a leaderboard of who worked for how long. We also want to pair this with a companion app that will also keep the stats for you. So the user will be able to label her task and see it on her phone how long she’s studied on which task. The app will allow users to insert their own background music and study durations as well so that it will customizable for the power users of this app.