Hackathons are a great way to rapidly develop and test out new features. In voice we are very lucky that Amazon among some other organisations run hackathons for voice apps.
We’ve already won a hackathon in the past with our Vegan Scout Google Action but now we’ve secured a place in the finals of the Alexa Skills Challenge: Alexa Conversations.
Our Skill Learning Out Loud is one of 10 skills chosen as finalists in the hackathon where there was a total of 134 entries.
We now go into into the final with a chance of winning the whole competition and the grand prize of $20,000.
This hackathon was all related to the new Alexa Conversations feature which allows us to hand over to Alexa to handle complex conversations with users. In Learning Out Loud we use Alexa Conversations to gather information from the user about their school year, when exams are and what they are studying. This then allows us to adjust the questions for the quiz element of the skill.
Gaining this first-hand insight into how this new feature can be used allows us to understand where, and how to apply this new technology in paid projects with clients. We’ll now be looking to use this knowledge in future projects.
Next for Learning out Loud?
We now have until the 18th of October to make further improvements to the skill ready for the final round of judging.
You can read up about the entire Learning Out Loud project over on the case study along with our demo video for the hackathon submission. Once again big thanks to The Audio Tailors who created all the rich audio in the skill and Hana Skarratt skill icon for the project.