Natural Nature Alexa Skill

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  Alexa, start Natural Nature

Inspiration

During my internship at Sweetwater, I found a love for hearing nature in a better experience than what other skills have offered. A colleague of mine records all of the audio. While very limited to 4 sounds right now we wanted to capture the pristine audio of the Midwest United States.

What it does

Natural Nature is a very simple skill that allows users to experience audio from nature. It has 4 tracks that have minimal editing (just compression and minor EQ) to really showcase nature as we hear it as humans.

How I built it

I used a combination of Voiceflow, shoutout to them, S3, CloudFront and Lambda to build the skill.

Challenges I ran into

Customer experience is really important and in some audio skills I noticed they would ask "Are you still listening?". I really didn't like this but I know that it is important to help data transfer costs. My solution was to use a CDN so that it can still run but not accure so many transfer charges.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is the first skill I have built, although not a new idea or a big project I enjoyed learning about AWS and really taking a dive into the ecosystem.

What I learned

I learned all about AWS environments and how IDEs interact between the two. The whole publishing and updating the skill is something new.

What's next for Natural Nature Alexa Skill

I want to add more audio, my colleague and I are in that process right now actually. If you have read this far then consider going to cesaonic.com and reading blogs about how we capture it.

Built With

• amazon-cloudfront-cdn
• amazon-web-services
• lamda
• s3