Stocks Guru

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  Welcome Screen

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  Stock Price check

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  Dow Jones check

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  One way to say good bye

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  Another way to say good bye

Inspiration

Typical finance websites assumes that you have financial background and you are reasonably comfortable with stock tickers, earnings, graphs etc. However, if you want a simple and straightforward way to keep track of stock prices relevant to you without the upsell of stories, blogs, podcasts or analysis, this skill is for you.

I wanted to create a skill that is easy to use, gets you the info you need and gets out of your way.

What it does

Stocks Guru, an Alexa skill, makes it easier to find and track stock prices, save your favorite stocks in the list. The best part is that you never have to utter the stock symbol during the interaction with Alexa. It is also a stateful skill. You need to use invocation phrase once to invoke the skill. Once invoked, simple say your commands and when you are done, simply say "good bye"

How I built it

The skill architecture and designs follows voice first philosophy. The information on the screen compliments the information being spoken by Alexa. The skill is built on AWS server-less services. It leverages following technologies:

• AWS Lambda Function written in JavaScript to handle intent requests and send responses in JSON format
• AWS Dynamodb for backend database to store user's stocks list
• Intent confirmation through dialog delegation to facilitate conversational interaction
• Alexa Presentation Language (APL) to display information on alexa enabled devices with screens
• External APIs to get information about stocks and market indexes in real time

Challenges I ran into

• Comprehensive end to end software testing. Thank goodness, I found ask dialog command.
• Inability to put debugger in AWS lambda function. I did not had time to set it up locally but I would love to know, if there is a way to do it.
• Alexa Presentation Language documentation - I wish it wasn't as distributed. It was difficult initially to "connect the dots". Once, I got the hang of it, it was a smooth sailing.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is my second Alexa skill. I manage to built it in about one month, while I held a full time job and had to spend numerous evening hours and weekends to experiment with various feature.

What I learned

My knowledge about AWS serverless/managed services and Alexa skill development have expanded tremendously in last four weeks.

What's next for Stocks Guru

It really depends on user's feedback. I would love to add more emotions to Alexa's voice and add earnings functionality, which in turn will make Stocks Guru even smarter and more contextually intelligent.

Additional documentation

Help

About

Built With

• alexa-presentation-language
• amazon-alexa
• aws-dynamodb
• aws-lambda