Amazon Echo and Alexa Make Life Better for People with Disabilities - Lou Person

Amazon Echo and Alexa Make Life Better for People with Disabilities - Lou Person

Amazon Echo and Alexa help people with disabilities.  Echo and the voice service which controls it, Alexa, provide the solution.  I want to share a story with you about a terrific young man named Dylan and how he uses Echo.

Our friends Karen and Jeff have a son named Dylan who is blind.  At a barbeque recently, we were talking about all the ways Dylan uses Echo in his life.  As an example, he reads Harry Potter through Echo using Alexa.  He also uses many of the applications and games available through the Amazon Alexa Console. 

Dylan's father, Jeff asked me if I could build a game for Dylan, so I wrote a small Alexa skill for Dylan called "Dylan Day".  Dylan Day will cite historical events which occurred on the day spoken.  It will pull the information from Wikipedia then read it out loud.  "Alexa, Ask Dylan Day what happened today".  "Alexa, Ask Dylan Day what happened on July 4th".  The Echo will read actual events which occurred throughout history on those days.

A skill is an application or game which Alexa runs.  In other words, developers train Alexa with specific skills they write.  In this case, "Dylan Day" will recite all the events which occurred on a certain day in history.  It will query against Wikipedia and read back the events on the date spoken.  Although the skill itself is relatively simply, hopefully Dylan feels like a rock star having his name used as the invocation phrase of a skill running through Alexa that is available to the entire world.

If you have an Echo, Dot or Tap install the skill "Dylan Day".  On your phone login to the Alexa app (on your computer go to: http://alexa.amazon.com).  Click on skills and search for "Dylan Day". 

Here are some of the interactions for the Skill:
"Alexa, Ask Dylan Day"
"Alexa, Ask Dylan Day what happened today"
"Alexa, Ask Dylan Day what happened on July Fourth"
"Alexa, Ask Dylan Day what happened on December 31"

Although the application is very simple, I hope it has a big impact for Dylan and anyone else who uses it. 

I wrote another post that is technical in nature which describes all the components that go into the Dylan application.  This includes the AWS Console, Lambda Service, Amazon Developer Console, Javascript JSON and AWS Explorer in Visual Studio.  You can view the post here:  http://blog.louperson.com/2016/07/AWS-Alexa-Skill-Lou-Person.html

Please reference the source of the initial code (which I modified slightly for Dylan Day).  The skill originated from an example skill publicly available found here: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/docs/using-the-alexa-skills-kit-samples

I work at Amazon and the postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent Amazon's position.

Post by Lou Person, I work at Amazon Web Services.