First Run in With Alexa

Today I finished writing a skill for the Alexa project I chose to tackle. Alexa is a voice assistant created by Amazon. Developers from all over are free to write a skill for Alexa and as long as it passes the approval process from Amazon it will be able to be used by anyone that has access to an Amazon Echo or Tap. The skill I learned how to create is a simple trivia game that is launched with the command “Alexa, launch Spider-man trivia game”. I’m a big comic book fan and I chose to make the trivia game about one of my favorite superheroes. Alexa is supported in two languages which come in Node.js and at the moment Python. There wasn’t any much in terms of challenges per se, but there was a ton of information that I had to reread for trying to submit a skill for approval. All in all it was a really good learning experience since I’ve never done anything similar before.