0

I am making a mobile app for a college project that will feature some games. I was thinking on how can I make it a better, and I thought of using my amazon echo that has been collecting dust since I bought it :D

I had an idea of saying something like "alexa show me only FPS games", and in my app I grab that input and filter the app to only show FPS games. But the question is, how do I grab alexas input? What's the simplest way, is it even possible? Had an idea that maybe I can grab alexas input in a form of a JSON, and then program it accordingly, but is that possible?

I have never programmed alexa skills, so I have no clue where to start with this, any directions would be pretty helpful! Also, keep in mind that I am a student that doesn't have as many programming experience, but I am willing to do the research.

Thanks a lot, cheers!

John Rotenstein
  • 241,921
  • 22
  • 380
  • 470
Le Svr
  • 35
  • 6

1 Answers1

0

The traditional Alexa skills use Lambda functions that respond to events from Alexa Skills Kit. This flow of events would look like the following:

Echo device -> Alexa -> AWS Lambda -> Alexa -> Echo Device

Lambda functions are not Alexa-only components though, meaning you can program it to do whatever you want. Want to record metrics to a database before Alexa responds? Don't want Alexa to respond at all? That's entirely up to you.

For the use case you subscribed, you could write a Lambda function that filters a list of games for any spoken keyword and pushes that list to a client, and then ends the Alexa conversation: a "one-way" Alexa skill.

Echo device -> Alexa -> AWS Lambda

With that being said, you don't really need to use Alexa for that. There are plenty of other speech-to-text programs that can accomplish this (Amazon Transcribe, Watson Speech to Text, Google Speech Recognition). Additionally, those you could probably plug in without writing any server side code, so that's a plus.

mrshl
  • 531
  • 3
  • 12