Trophies

If you publish a skill (app) for the Amazon Alexa, you can receive a hoodie/shirt/pair of socks/etc as a reward from Amazon. Should your skill be used by 100 or more unique users, you will earn an Echo Dot device on top of the aforementioned reward, all for free.

After succeeding with Magical Messages, I realized that Alexa doesn't really do much.
But we can make it do much.

Magical Messages was and is really fun to use for me but I didn't want to limit my working knowledge to "one response" skills. The ideas I had were much more complicated and as a result, I needed to learn more.

There are wonderful tutorials online that compensate for -- at the time of writing -- the lack of documentation provided by Amazon in spades. Tutorials are super when attempting to learn new skills (both general skills and Alexa skills).

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Come Thanksgiving break, I wanted to write a new skill that can do more than Magical Messages. My goal at the time was to create a skill that responds to the user based on a user-specified piece of information. Instead of a "start-Alexa responds-end" dialogue, it would now be a "start-Alexa asks-user selects-Alexa responds accordingly-end" operation.

Come Holiday Facts, a skill that provides facts for a handful of your favorite holidays 😮 !

Being able to hear Alexa respond appropriately to different queries felt incredible -- the experience felt close to a real conversation, albeit a short conversation!

Accomplishing this project only lead to ideas of more intricate projects, projects that will engage the user more than before and will feel more and more like a real conversation.

The goal? When people use my projects, they should feel more of,
"A friend that I can't see but can definitely speak to and feel connected with,"
and less of,
"Wow! This toy can talk like a human! What a weird piece of technology!"

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I submitted my skill and received a coooooool hoodie in the mail two months later! Not long after that, at my doorstep sat a tiny white Echo Dot.

The hoodie and Dot are special to me. To me, they are the physical manifestations of both me pursuing my efforts and the process of my vision becoming reality.
In the eyes of Amazon,
These are probably just handouts for helping popularize the Alexa marketplace.

But to
Me,
These
Are

Trophies.

It isn't about the hoodie or the Dot, though. These things are fun, but they aren't the why I created the experience written above. For me,
I do what I do for the experiences, experiences that remind me of where I started and how far I've come. I do what I do for the knowledge I'll gain, knowledge to help bring myself even further.
I do what I do because it's what I'm supposed to do.

Hi, I'm Vivek Bhookya. I'm making this world a better place.

Albeit slowly and steadily.

How are you making the world a better place?

Looots of love,
Vivek

{

Alexa perks for people who publish skills (such as future you)

My first Alexa tutorial!

Greaaaat set of tutorials

}