Old Time Radio

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Inspiration

I really enjoy listening to old radio shows and I thought Alexa would be the perfect device to hear them on. I wanted the skill to be immersive - featuring authentic vintage commercials to help with immersion. The ultimate goal was to transport the listener back to simpler times.

What it does

Old Time Radio lets users listen to back-to-back vintage radio shows. The user can either choose the show, or listen to shows from one of the genres. After each show, a vintage commercial is played - followed by the next episode, or show from a genre. If a user has not subscribed to ISP, they will also hear a promotional message in-between shows. Subscribing to ISP removes the message and also allows the user to continue a show - even after listening to another audio skill.

How I built it

I originally built this as a self-hosted skill using PHP on a rented VPS. The original did not feature ISP and was one of the first skills I had written for the Alexa. As I continued to develop my skills on the Alexa, I knew it was time to upgrade. I built this new version in NodeJS and it is now an Alexa-hosted skill. A MySQL database is used to store audio info for premium subscribers. Audio shows are sourced from Archive.org. Audacity and GarageBand were used to produce some of the speech audio.

Challenges I ran into

I hadn't used NodeJS before, so this was a challenge, but also fun to learn. Using AWS resources was also challenging, yet rewarding.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Creating a skill that I actually use myself on a daily basis.

What I learned

I learned so much. Having previously developed self-hosted skills, learning to deploy skills as Alexa-hosted, has seriously cut down my development time and resources, opening up possibilities for many future skills.