Tale Spinner

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  Tale Spinner

Inspiration

We wanted to build a skill to bring kids favorite activity:storytelling to Alexa. Using this inspiration, we attempted to tinker with the format of the skill to make it more interesting for our intended audience.

What it does

Tale Spinner skill contains a collection of stories told in an engaging manner. The skill tells the story in parts and asks a question in between the parts. In the end, the skill tells the user the number of questions answered correctly as well as the user's overall standing on the leaderboard.

How I built it

We started with the objective of bringing stories to the Alexa medium. Once we found an open source website, the rest of it was easy. We selected the stories that would fit the medium and then came up with interesting questions to keep the kids engaged. We also introduced the concept of leader board to make the skill more appealing to kids.

Challenges I ran into

The most challenging task was to find an open source website where copyright free audio books were available. Next, we had to process the audio files to reduce the noise part. Then, we had to bring all the stories together in the format of an Alexa skill without ruining the experience.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We have created a skill which brings many traditional fairy tails to the Alexa medium. This will help the kids to lsiten to the same stories we used to and enjoy them.

What I learned

Alexa is an engaging medium. It presents an opportunity of makers of all kinds to bring their content to the conversational interface in an interesting manner.

What's next for Tale Spinner

We will continue to add new stories to the skill as well as keep updating the questions to keep the skill interesting for the kids

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• node.js