Voice Assistant Adventure

Have you ever wanted an immersive D&D experience but your the only one around? Well now you can go on one by yourself using your Amazon Echo. Talk to the Echo as if it was a Dungeon Master!

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What it does

Start the game with the Alexa skill "start voice assistant adventure" and play along with the "dungeon master" to go on a quest.

How we built it

Created an Alexa Skill that uses our external web server endpoint to send the users commands for interpretation and playback of the scenario to the Alexa.

Challenges we ran into

The external server that Alexa connects to has very specific requirements. It has to be SSL secure and host a way to handle the Alexa HTTP requests using one of Amazon's various APIs. Setting up a server to connect and send a response to the Alexa took up the majority of out time. We went through various server implementations but ended up using the Google Cloud Platform App Engine where we program the web server and game locally and then "gcloud app deploy" from the command line.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting our server to receive Alexa requests and correctly respond was the hardest but also most rewarding result. Since the game is hosted on our own server, the possibilities for expansion on the game are limitless.

What we learned

Learned a lot about the Amazon Alexa APIs for Python and Django. Django itself was a feat, as well as remote connecting to the Google Cloud. A big part of the project was being able to deploy successful to GCP App Engine

What's next for Voice Assistant Adventure

Now that the connection between the Alexa and our web server is strong and we can read user actions easily, we can work more on fleshing out the game itself.

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