The latest articles on DEV Community by Tyler Chong (@viltaria). https://dev.to/viltaria https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F195069%2Fd2507ea5-7dcc-4efb-9a8f-1bea2903b0af.png https://dev.to/viltaria en Tyler Chong Tue, 17 Dec 2019 13:11:54 +0000 https://dev.to/viltaria/lost-in-translation-an-alexa-skill-4dbh https://dev.to/viltaria/lost-in-translation-an-alexa-skill-4dbh <p><em>"Alexa, launch <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B082R3YQ3B/ref=sr_1_1">Translation Lost</a>"</em></p> <p>Lost in Translation was the first Alexa Skill that me (and a friend) published on Amazon's Alexa Skill Store. This post will overview what the game does, how it does it's stuff, and some of the problems we ran into.</p> <h2> What It Do </h2> <p>Lost in Translation is a speech based game in which Alexa says a phrase in an accent and the player has to guess what Alexa said. For example, Alexa might say something like "May the Force be With You", but in a Korean accent. After which the player should respond with that same phrase. By default, the player has five minutes to score as many points as they can, with each phrase correct being a point. If they need help, the player can ask Alexa for a hint, or just give up on the phrase if it's too hard (sometimes it's near impossible).</p> <h2> How It Do </h2> <p><a href="https://github.com/Viltaria/Translation-Lost">Code Repo</a></p> <p>This project was written using Amazon's <a href="https://litexa.com/">Litexa</a>, or a literate style programming language for Alexa Skills. Litexa provides an easy interface interacting with AWS services such as DynamoDB, S3, and Polly. You can view the entire workflow of the Skill in <code>litexa/main.litexa</code>.</p> <h2> Problems </h2> <ul> <li>Limited Alexa/Polly <a href="https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/custom-skills/speech-synthesis-markup-language-ssml-reference.html#voice">Voice Support</a> <ul> <li>Alexa doesn't support a lot of the voices that AWS Polly offers, this led us to hardcode a lot of the voice phrases, as we couldn't dynamically generate most of the ones we wanted (the Asianic Language ones are just hilarious)</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <p><a href="https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B082R3YQ3B/ref=sr_1_1">Try it out!</a></p> <p><a href="//keygolem.com/lost-in-translation/">More Info</a></p> alexa aws