Tiny Tots Radio

Inspiration

Helps kids learn and have fun through amazing educational content from the BBC UK.

What it does

The skill makes available content from the BBC UK for school kids available via the Audio Player APIs. Helps them learn and have fun.

How I built it

BBC UK does not have any RESTful APIs. I wrote a crawler that finds interesting content on BBC UK, and categorizes them. The crawler is written using node.js, and uses a headless version of Chromium to pull all the interesting content, categorize the content and upload it to S3 with the right set of permissions.

The Skill uses the Kotlin programming language, and uses the new Dialog Builder APIs. This is also the first time I used the AudioPlayer APIs.

Challenges I ran into

No well defined APIs for BBC UK's amazing treasure trove of content.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Built the skill end-to-end in about 2 days. The Alexa APIs are really pleasant to use.

What I learned

Learn't about crawling and categorizing podcasts using a headless version of Chromium, using the Audio Player APIs.

What's next for Tiny Tots Radio

Publish to the Alexa Skills store.

Built With

• kotlin
• node.js
• puppeteer