Take a Break

Inspiration

I'm a second year Computer Science student at university and I'm just coming up to my end of year exams. Therefore I'm revising, and we've always been told a key part of revision is taking effective breaks so that your brain isn't overworked. However, when you actually get to it it's often quite difficult to think of something to do with that time, so I decided to create an Alexa skill to help students working at home to take effective revision breaks so they can revise better and have a healthier mind.

What it does

This skill can currently reccomend short outdoors or indoors activities (or a selection of either) for the user to do while they're taking a revision break. The skill is avaliable to Australian, Canadian, Indian, US and UK Alexa users.

How I built it

I recently came across Storyline which I decided I wanted to use for this project. This allowed me to really quickly create a functional skill, and this will be much easier to maintain as all the data for responses is taken from some Google Sheets documents which pass the data into the skill.

What I learned

I learnt a new way of creating skills other than AWS Lambda, and I learnt that Google Sheets can turn spreadsheets into JSON data which is handy! I also found out about the Alexa Skills Kit Sound Library, which I've used in this skill and I'd love to use more in the future as it's a great resource to make skills sound better.

What's next for Take a Break

In the future I'd like to give the skill a selection of books so it can reccomend something for you to read as I think this would be a good way to introduce people to new books.

Built With

• storyline