Poptime

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  Poptime packs

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  Poptime Xmas Edition Screens

Inspiration

A recent Deloitte report states that the average American spends more than 40 minutes a day just searching for TV shows. Thats a long time! So we thought, why not make those 40 minutes fun, by turning the TV discovery process in to a Quiz. Simply put, why not play a Quiz and learn whats on TV at the same time.

What it does

Poptime helps you discover shows via a Quiz, we have 20 new quiz packs each month. Packs are around what's recently launched on TV or what's about to launch. You don't need to know anything about the show, as we package the discovery in to general TV questions which focus on theme's where we can introduce the show. You can play all 20 packs and compete via a Leaderboard to see if you can be crowned the "TV Quiz King", you get that title if your number one on the leaderboard. We launch 20 new packs each month.

How we built it

We built Poptime, using a screen first approach. So the experience is optimised for screens using APL. We use a combination of host recorded audio, visuals and TTS to create the experience. We have been through multiple iterations to get to what is in the Skill store today. Always optimising the skill and making the experience better after we read the reviews.

Challenges we ran into

We built for a Screen first experience, so when it came to headless we had to also make the experience work there. We wanted to have a skill which stayed fresh so we needed to work out a way to change questions every month. We wanted to use Audio APL, but because the skill also uses other sounds, theme tunes and music we decided to just focus on Screen APL.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are proud of being able to create a brand new way to solve the "What to watch on TV" problem. We are also super proud of the actual skill it self, it's probably the best skill our team has ever designed.

What I learned

We learned a lot about how to use a Screen and Voice at the same time, we learnt that if we have a screen we don't need to say everything. We also found that users had much better recall when they were provided with a screen. The other thing we learnt was how to build a Quiz, whats actually involved in creating a Game and how to keep users entertained and challenged at the same time.

What's next for Poptime

We want to introduce actual trailers, so you can really discover what to watch. We would also love to add a Battle Royale mode, a bit like Fortnite, where 100 users can all play at the same time against each other until there is a last man standing.

Built With

• alexa
• amazon-dynamodb
• apl
• lambda