Inspiration“They effectively translated our ideas and concepts into actual features that we could use.”
What it does
Players can listen to up to three voice clips of well-known people and/or celebrities talking every day, as well as view a blurred image of the celebrity. After each clip, Alexa will ask you who you think is talking, and you must try to answer correctly. This will earn you a score for the monthly and all-time leader boards. The player can ask Alexa for hints, or to skip that voice clip to move onto the next one. Users scores are awarded depending on how many incorrect answers they gave for that voice and whether they used a hint or not. Users can also ask to hear yesterday’s answers, in case they couldn’t get the answers on that day.
How we built it
It was very important for this skill that the quality of content was the focus, and so it was essential that high quality and good voice clips were used for the skill. We found it was quite a challenge to not only find high quality audio of the people we wanted for the game, but also clips that did not have other people speaking or have any background noise.
As well as gathering all the voices, we then had to categorise them into easy, medium and hard categories. This proved difficult as different generations of users may find different clips easy or harder than others. We ended setting the medium and harder clips as voice clips that might be shorter, or lower in quality, and by who we thought might just be less well known overall.
A more technical challenge encountered was developing with the Alexa Presentation Language (APL), which I had to learn whilst developing the skill. Though since the game has a very sole focus, solving the voice clips, almost all the APL views within the skill are identical. So, I was able to focus more time on perfecting one screen, and then using this across the project and just put the appropriate data on the screen.
Challenges we ran into
Accomplishments that we're proud of
What we learnedI have learnt how to develop APL as well as better practices for structuring it more efficiently. For example, there are many APL views in the project, all of which are almost identical, what I have learnt that would be more effective in future projects would be to condense these down into one primary view that I would use for each screen and just use the appropriate data.
I have also been able to hone prompts to the user for upsells and showing the leader boards. Testing has shown that constant prompts on each play for these things can become tedious to the user, and so we have reduced the frequency of these for a much better user experience.
What's next for gcast We plan to add further voices of celebrities to the skill, to create a continuing user experience with new content every day.
We would like to implement a multiplayer experience for Voice of the Day that will allow users to play with each other.
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