The Animal Sound Game

Inspiration

My inspiration comes from my love of animals as a kid. I always wanted to be a zookeeper and learning about animals was my favorite. I feel like the sounds I grew up learning like moo and baaaah were very common and are actually different in other languages. I wanted a way to teach kids the real sounds that animals make.

What it does

This is a short game for kids that plays a sound and then asks them to guess it. It uses real sounds captured by many different open source organizations.

How I built it

I have always been interested in programming ever since I was 6 years old. I started off learning Visual Basic and C# but when I got an Echo Dot I knew that I wanted to learn how to make skills! Since then I have watched many YouTube videos and read many articles and now I somewhat understand what I am doing!

Challenges I ran into

When building this app the main challenge I ran into was that fact that I had never made Alexa play a sound file before. There was a weird conversion process that I had to do for each audio file and then I had to integrate it into the skill. Also just learning more Node.Js was a challenge. I have never used javascript or node in the past other then Alexa skills. Every time I make a new skill it seems that I have to learn more and more as I push the limits of my knowledge.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Overall I am proud of the skill as a whole and my ability to learn more about how skill development works while attending college. Being a freshman it has been a lot to take in and a big adjustment but I am proud with how well it went.

What I learned

I learned so much from this one skill I developed its hard to explain it all. When I start a new skill each time I make sure to try my hardest not to use any existing code. This helps me memorize the basics which I am still working on. Also I learned how to convert audio to different bit rates. This was new to me as I do not have much knowledge on audio files and until this skill I had no idea what a bit rate was. Also I learned how to integrate the audio file into my skill.

What's next for The Animal Sound Game

The Animal Sound Game needs more and more sounds. Teaching kids new sounds everyday is a fantastic thing. Online leader boards and competitive matches would be the perfect things to make this skill seem more complete.

Built With

• node.js