Past Lives Quiz

Inspiration

My wife and I were playing around with Alexa and thought, what is it that people really like to do on the internet. They like to take personality quizzes that tells them what kind of famous person they are. Then we had the thought that we could make that popular past time educational by tying the personality to historical figures, current political figures or mythical beasts popular in western literature. So we came up with Past Lives Quiz.

What it does

Its basically a set of personality quizzes. You get to pick whether you want to find out which founding father you are, which world leader or which mythical beast. You then answer a series of questions by saying 1, 2 or 3 (whichever corresponds to your answer). After the quiz is done, it tells you which person or thing it matched you to and some information about that person.

How we built it

We built it using the alexa skills kit for node.js, the ASK-CLI and that was pretty much it.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was how the skill handled responses that didn't fit the one, two or three. In some states, these responses were properly handled and in others they weren't. The fix was fairly simple, but the behavior was unexpected based on prior skills we had worked on.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made the skill! And we hope it's entertaining and educational.

What we learned

This was not our first skill we developed, but we were able to put into practice a lot of things we learned before to really stream line the development and focus on where bug detection really needed to be. We also learned a little more about how exactly Alexa treats responses that don't map to utterances or intents.