John Hancock - Create Amazon Alexa Skill

Welcome to John Hancock - Create Amazon Alexa Skill. As part of this contest, you will create a new Skill for Amazon Alexa.

 

Contest Details

Our client wants to create a new Skill in Amazon Alexa. This skill allows the user to ask Alexa to read out a list of news headlines and after listening to the headlines, to ask Alexa to read the detailed news for a specified headline.

 

For this contest, you will have to create the following:

1. A javascript object that contains multiple news sources (Example - Google News, CNN etc) and under each news source, a set of headlines and the details for each headline. You can visit Google News or any other news website to get this data. Have at least 2 news sources, 5 headlines and thus 5 details under each news source.

2. An AWS Lambda function that uses Amazon Alexa Nodejs SDK. The function makes use of the javascript object as the source for the incoming Alexa requests and responds accordingly. Note that the incoming Alexa requests are practical voice inputs. As such, beside the intents created as part of this contest, you are expected to handle other common intents.

3. A custom interaction model skill in Amazon Alexa. You are expected to handle voice inputs such as:

   1. Alexa, ask John Hancock for today’s headlines

   2. Alexa, ask John Hancock for today’s headlines from Google News

   3. Alexa, ask John Hancock for CNN’s latest headlines

   4. Alexa, ask John Hancock for more details on the second headline

   5. Alexa, ask John Hancock for more details on Hurricane Irma (You can assume the headline referenced here to either be the exact string as read out by Alexa or a substring of it).

   6. Alexa, ask John Hancock for more details on headline 4.

    You can certainly expect other common variations for the above inputs. The implementation details, particularly the intents and the slots along with the variations is left to you.

 

Points To Note

• Use Nodejs 6

• The major requirement for this contest is setting up the Skill correctly in Alexa.

• The minor requirement for this contest is getting the AWS Lambda function and the news data correct. Note that an incorrectly implemented Lambda function, that does not respond correctly to the incoming Alexa requests, thereby failing the testing of the Alexa skill will be taken up as a major requirement failing.

• Alexa SDK and the documentation on developing skills for Alexa is quite extensive and easy to follow. As such, you are expected to follow best practices here - naming conventions, standard intents to handle, slots etc.

• Let’s work with English based new sources for now.

Final Submission Guidelines

Provide a README or a document that goes in detail on how to set up the skill as well as how to upload the Lambda function. You can use the document present on the existing examples for reference (Reference 1, Reference 2). Zip the README or documentation along with the lambda function and upload it to Topcoder.