Inspiration
All of the existing skills that we tried on Amazon Echo seemed very linear, so we wanted to build an competitive multi-player experience.
What it does
QuizBattle is a game to play against your friends, where Amazon Echo presents a question to the players. The quickest player to answer the question correctly gains a point. First player to two points wins.
How we built it
We query Quizlet's flashcard API and store question answer pairs into a CockroachDB database hosted on Azure. Our backend is also hosted on Azure, and the Echo queries it for randomized questions.
Challenges we ran into
The development tools for Amazon Echo are unbelievably limited. In its current state, the Echo cannot distinguish between two distinct voices, and there are significant constraints on how it pattern matches responses given by the user.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Actually building out a multi-player experience on a system that seems so inherently sequential.
- Finishing a hack! WOOHOO!
- Getting 2 hours of shut-eye
What we learned
- Amazon Echos have very limited capabilities.
- CockroachDB's distributed database is amazing.
What's next for QuizBattle
Given more time, we would:
- Polish up user interactions
- Add more categories of questions
- Add flexibility to game length
- Modify number of supported players
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