The Space Travel

Inspiration

Travelling in the space has always been the dream of mankind. And being a father of a 4 years old kid I always face so many cute and curious questions from our little astronaut about earth,Jupiter,Saturn and so on.So I thought of building something which will satisfy the kid's never ending curiosity about space objects and educate them with the amazing facts about the planets and solar system.However I wanted to do this in a more engaging and entertaining way.And building an interactive Alexa skill was the way I found!( And I would not hesitate to agree even, I am kind of thrilled and excited while taking this virtual space tour)

What it does

"The Space Travel" is a interactive virtual space travel to the planets in our solar system.

1. When you launch the skill Alexa will welcome the users in the virtual spaceship.Then their will be a short and entertaining takeoff sequence with sound effects.

2. Once the virtual spaceship is in the outer space(:)) Alexa will ask the user whether she/he wants to visit a specific planet or all the planets in solar system.

   2 A. If user says single planet then alexa will ask the planet name to be visited ( at this step Alexa will display a card on the companion app giving a list of the planets) Once answered the virtual spaceship will take the user to that planet. Alexa will virtually do a quick stroll on the planet or hover over, along with the user and describe the weird facts about the planet as if the user is there.( while we are on that planet a card will be displayed on the companion app with the image of that planet for supporting visualization). Once done it will again ask the user if he wants to visit the next planet or go back to earth.

   2 B. If the user goes for all planets tour, Alexa will take to each of the planets in the solar system one by one( virtually!).giving an option to come back on earth after each planet visit.

3. Once the user says he wants to visit earth the spaceship will descend down to earth and the travel will end there.

4. Each of the step will have few sound effects, light humor, speech variations and characters to make the journey more interesting.

How I built it

The very first thing I did was I myself acquired and refreshed my knowledge about the planets and picked out few important and interesting facts.Then I created a flow and the speech content. With this I created Alexa skill in the alexa developer portal with supporting Lambda function. For database and to store the media files I used Amazon S3. for few of the sounds I used Amazon Polly

Challenges I ran into

Putting the facts about the planets in an entertaining and brief way so as to grab kid's attention was a challenging task.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Although the skill is apt for higher age kids to grasp all the information.When I first introduced my 4 years old to the skill he was too excited and he kept on asking for different planets.Now he knows all the planets names and also can identify the planets by image which I feel the first accomplishment I felt I achieved.

What I learned

I learned how to use sound effects in an Alexa skill.what is Amazon Polly ( beautiful feature indeed). I learned about amazon S3 .

What's next for The Space Travel

The skill can further be extended out of the solar system covering few other galaxies and space objects like black hole,comets and so on. It can have different complexity levels for a different age group brackets.

Built With

• alexa
• amazon-web-services
• lambda
• node.js
• s3