SingAlong

Sing and dance with Alexa, learn from songs and have fun singing, dancing and playing together!

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Inspiration

Knowing exactly how much our kids love watching kids music videos on YouTube but at the same time feeling that we should limit their screen-time, this turned out to be a golden opportunity - to create an even more engaging experience, completely screen-free, but with the same songs the children already enjoy so much!
Singing and dancing together creates a fantastic feeling of collaboration and positivity and there is a certain kind of magic in creating harmonies with voices and body movements. We are bringing some of this magic to the Amazon Echo, together with Alexa.

What it does

The skill provides a fun, safe space for children to sing, dance and play whenever they feel like it. The skill currently offers four different songs, with varying levels of interaction, adapted for children with different interests in varying age-groups.
The simplest songs are Incy Wincy Spider and Head Shoulders Knees and Toes, where you sing together with Alexa. If you feel like it you can also make the movesor dance in any style you like. There is no voice interaction required for the first two songs, allowing young children to easily use the skill.
Older children can choose to sing about Old McDonald and learn the sounds of the farm animals or sing and interact with Wheels On the Bus, where the story moves forward by learning and singing about the different people.

How I built it

We based the skill on the examples and demos provided by Amazon. This gave us a head start with a nice interactive platform to build on. Having the functionality for parsing and sending the JSON requests allowed us to focus on developing the interaction model. Initially we created a non-linear experience, but after user testing we decided to go for a simple narrative, where the songs and stories progress in the way children are used to.

Challenges I ran into

Already at the start of the project we decided to focus on singing, dancing and learning. We tried different quiz-like approaches, but felt that we just didn’t get the flow that we were looking for.
We also tried using traditional interaction based on giving “correct” answers, but building on how real kids interacted with the skill made us realize that sometimes the best leaning is based on having fun.
Another challenge was that animal sounds can be hard to recognize and match against the Slot values.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Coming up with creative solutions for allowing children to use the skill in a way that is natural to them.

What I learned

Developing voice-interactive games for children while caring for your own children turned out to be such a blast! We really recommend this to anyone who wants a challenge :)

What's next for SingAlong

  • Add all the top 20 most popular children’s songs (also making the song selector/main menu smarter and more interactive).
  • Make some of the songs more interactive, for example, its common to sing the Incy Wincy and Heads Shoulders songs fast or very fast, so it should be possible to tell Alexa to sing faster. It is also fun to sing Heads Shoulders backwards.
  • We have versions of the songs with guitar and piano, but haven’t had time to record and implement these in the skill just yet.
  • We have some pretty cool ideas for how to use Echo Show in SingAlong, we look forward to developing the skill further!

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