Musical Chairs

Musical Chairs!

Inspiration

I was inspired to create a skill for children. As with all of the skills I create, I focused on using real human voice, rather than the regular Robo-voice. In creating the app, I wanted to introduce randomness as well as musical diversity. I also wanted to keep the users ( who are likely children ) engaged and entertained.

What it does

The Skill plays a game of Musical Chairs, where one less chair is available to the players than the number of players. When the music stops, the goal is to sit down in one of the available chairs. The odd player without a chair is removed from the game. And, another round begins...

How I built it

The skill is built using standard NodeJS-based code. The audio files for both the human voicing as well as the songs are stored in Amazon S3 and are retrieved through API calls.

Challenges I ran into

My biggest challenge was recording my own voice 'legibly'. I don't possess studio-quality or even podcast-quality equipment.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud all the way around of the effort.

What I learned

I continue to learn how to record audio and place it in the formats that are allowable for Alexa, as well as techniques for storage and retrieval of files in the cloud.