Tag: Skill

Categories
Digital Healthcare Speech Assistants

Top New Alexa Skills by Students

Alexa Student Skills Icons
Alexa Student Skills Icons

In the “rapid prototyping” lecture of the degree program Digital Healthcare at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, students faced a unique task: after just a brief introduction to voice design and speech assistants, their assignment was to create and publish an Alexa skill or Google Assistant Action.

The topic was free to choose and up to the creativity of the students. Their creation had to pass the manual skill certification process performed by Amazon. This means that they didn’t have to just develop the skill, but also provide all required metadata like description and icons.

As a development tool for prototyping, we decided to use Voiceflow. It proved to be easy to use and extremely quick to achieve results already in our Alexa for Wellbeing Online Challenge.

Top Alexa Skills by the Students

In total, 14 skills have been developed and published by 14 students. Here, I’d like to highlight a few of the skills that I found especially interesting. Most of these are available in German only.

Cat Quiz

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Categories
Speech Assistants

Quick Hack: Random Dialog Paths in Voiceflow

Testing the random number selection in the Alexa Developer Console.

In dialog trees for voice assistants, you often need to introduce some randomness. If the smart speaker doesn’t always repeat the same phrases, the dialog sounds more natural. Many other use cases exist as well, e.g., you might want to ask the user a random question in a quiz.

Random Block in Voiceflow

To enable this functionality, Voiceflow includes a “Random” block. This enables choosing a different path each time. The “no duplicates” option ensures that it’s not going the same path twice.

However, while this works fine in the Voiceflow testing environment, it currently has issues when using the skill live on Amazon Alexa. Additionally, you might sometimes want to have more control over the process – e.g., pre-set the random choices, store them in a database for advanced logging or tease the next item when the skill ends.

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Categories
Cloud Events Speech Assistants

AWS IMAGINE: Accelerating Transformation in Education

AWS IMAGINE Accelerating transformation in education

As an unexpected catalyst, the COVID-19 pandemic drove rapid change in global education, including improved accessibility for some, affordability, and curricula aligned with job skills needed for the modern world.

Of course, cloud technologies play a fundamental role in the new world of teaching. In the global panel session by AWS, I’ll share insights about:

  • How remote students can solve a real-life wellbeing problem with a working prototype in just 10 days.
  • How learning and retention can be improved through the open-source Voice Learning Alexa skill.
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