The Wordsmith

Inspiration

I oftentimes read before bed, but sometimes I don't feel like starting a new novel. Usually when I feel like that, I go on websites like Imgur to find new entertaining content. Every once in a while, I come across posts that are short stories, or one sentence stories. Eventually, the idea came around that having a voice assistant read short one or two sentence stories from a community of people, or wordsmiths, would be pretty neat.

What it does

This skill allows you to listen to, and favorite stories from the up and coming wordsmiths.app website!

How I built it

Everything is written in C#. The skill is hosted by AWS Lambda, the website is hosted by Amazon Lightsail, and I have some things running on top of Docker because I'm cheap.

Challenges I ran into

• Trying to complete an MVP by the deadline for the competition. My idea came to me very late.
• Trying to write everything in C#. Some of the libraries created by the community are good, while others could use some work. Unfortunately, I did not have the time to put in work on those libraries.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• The fact that the website is ran completely on top of Docker is pretty neat.
• I'm also happy that I was able to write everything using C#.
• For the first time ever, I enabled account linking for one of my skills (it's currently turned off for any user that is not me). There was a lot of learning that went into that, both in how it can be implemented and other security considerations. The fact that I got it working is something I am very happy with.

What I learned

• Writing for AWS Lambda in C# is extremely easy now.
• Try to brainstorm early and hard if you want to enter a competition.
• Identify the features that make your product your product. This will help define what you need to support to have a minimally functional application, which will help keep you focused on delivering a "finished" product by a deadline.

What's next for The Wordsmith

Opening up the Beta for the Wordsmiths.app website. Adding more APL Documents to the Alexa Skill

Built With

• alexa.net
• amazon-web-services
• asp.net-core
• aws-cognito
• aws-lambda
• docker