SpeakAndSpell

Inspiration

My 7 year old son is very interested in spelling. When I was little, I had a Speak and Spell machine which I loved so I started looking for one for my son. I found out that the Speak and Spell was discontinued in the 1990s, so I looked to recreate the experience with our modern technology.

What it does

The speak spell Alexa skill recreates the childhood experience of spelling words from the Speak and Spell game. It has all four spelling levels and keeps score of your correctly spelled words.

How I built it

I started with the quiz game code as a sample and built it using the Alexa skills kit and node.js

Challenges I ran into

I was using some of the beta options which were not operating properly and spent some time troubleshooting and re-coding areas that would have otherwise been working properly. This was my first time using the new Alexa skills kit for node.js so I learned a lot as I went.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This was my first Alexa skill using some of the more sophisticated options such as state. I also wrote a batch script to make publishing it to Lambda faster and easier during testing.

What I learned

I got very comfortable with the new Alexa Skills Kit and am looking forward to developing more skills as I find things that need to be on the Alexa.

What's next for SpeakAndSpell

I would like to take advantage of the new speechcons features to have Alexa sound more expressive. I also left out some of the homonym words for simplicity, and would like to add those back in.

Built With

• node.js