My Slides

• 

  My Slides Alexa skill

Inspiration

I created My Slides Alexa skill to be a safe home for my family memorable moments. But recently, we started receiving emails from our customers who want to use it as tool to help dementia sufferers to remember their family members and friends. I found very inspiring Frank Engelman's blog post

What it does

The My Slides Alexa skill can play photo galleries on Echo devices with screen from your Dropbox account:

• organize photos into galleries (folders)
• play a gallery by name
• stop, help
• change image duration (10 - 90 seconds)
• change image scale (toggle between best-fill and best-fit)
• run slideshows with loops (5 loops in total)
• touch and voice navigation: scroll up, scroll down, go back
• selecting a gallery by touch and voice commands: select first item, select second item

Custom Task with Alexa routines integration: create Alexa routines that can start playing different photo galleries by name. Easy to manage , easy to use.

How we built it

AWS Lambda hosted skill, APL (Alexa Presentation Language), AWS DynamoDB, Dropbox API.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out how to continue running a slideshow from the same slide after changing image scale or a slides duration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Integration with Custom Tasks made user's experience nicer and easier.

What we learned

Pay constant attention to user's feedback. Be ready to adjust (sometimes completely change) your initial hypothesis.

What's next for My Slides

The skill is constantly evolving, thanks to our customers.

Built With

• alexa
• amazon-web-services
• api
• dropbox
• lambda