AiC Episode 75

In this episode, Teri welcomes “Awesome Aariv” Modi, a 5th Grade student and awesome Amazon Alexa Skill Developer.

Welcome, Aariv Modi!

Awesome Aariv came on to talk about his experience as a grade 5 student creating Alexa skills and also creating videos to help educate the voice technology community.

Awesome Aariv

  • One of his favorite hobbies is playing chess. Went to his first tournament when he was six.
  • He loves mystery books, plays basketball and loves video games.
  • He has been coding since he was 7. He started creating basic programs using Scratch and Khan Academy and then moved up to taking Codecademy courses on more complex topics.
  • He has a YouTube channel, Awesome Aariv, where he creates videos about math, chess and books, and recently started creating videos about Amazon Alexa.
  • He is very passionate about Alexa and loves developing new skills.

His Interest in Coding

  • When he looked at games he would wonder how they were built. He was always fascinated by the fact that just by typing code, one could create a game or any kind of great program. He wanted to learn that himself.

His Interest in Alexa

  • He was introduced to Alexa 3 years ago when his parents first bought an Echo device. He always thought that Alexa has amazing abilities. He was most fascinated by Alexa’s smart home features.
  • He was even more impressed when he learned that one could create their own skills for the whole world to use.
  • As he was learning some more Javascript, he decided to create his own skill. He created his first skill, Kids Advice, during his winter break. Once he created one, he wanted to create more. He currently has 3 skills; Kids Advice, Meal Buddy, and Wheel of Fun.
  • He also made a skill for his dad’s birthday as a gift.

Awesome Aariv Modi: A Grade 5 Alexa Skill Developer

Skills

  • Kids Advice: Aariv created Kids Advice using a fact skill template and added some extra code to it so that it asks the user whether they want another piece of advice. He created the skill to be introduced to AWS and the Amazon Developer Portal.
  • Meal Buddy: Aariv’s little brother wouldn’t eat no matter what his mother gave him! So Aariv was inspired to create his second skill, Meal Buddy, which entertains kids and also reminds them to eat. He learned more complex coding techniques from this skill.
  • Wheel of Fun: Aariv created Wheel of Fun to show his parents that he could build more than a fact skill by himself. It gives users a random piece of advice, fact, or fortune, and then asks the user whether they want to spin again to get more. This is his personal favourite and it is his most popular skill by a long shot. He has been adding more features to it and is currently working on adding monetization to it.

How Alexa Works

  • There are 3 main technologies that empower all voice assistants and they are ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), NLU (Natural Language Understanding), and TTS (Text-to-Speech)
  • When you say something to Alexa (Utterance), the Alexa device hears what you say and streams it to the Alexa service (which consists of ASR, NLU, and TTS). Once the utterance is in the Alexa service, ASR starts to work on it. ASR converts the audio into text for the rest of the service to use.
  • NLU then starts to work on it by figuring out what you’re trying to do. NLU then sends a request containing the intent to your back end, and your back end should have a handler for that intent otherwise the code will fail.
  • All your code logic will then run and send a response back to the Alexa service which is json text. But Alexa can’t speak json, it can only speak audio, which is where text-to-speech comes in to convert the text to speech. With that, Alexa can say the audio response from the back end which you hear.
  • That happens every single time we speak to Alexa.

Creating Multimodal Skills

  • Aariv has been thinking of making Wheel of Fun more multimodal.

Awesome Aariv’s Future Plans

  • His main focus is learning as much as possible.
  • He wants to keep adding new features to Wheel of Fun.
  • He wants to create more videos and update his blog posts with everything he learns.
  • He wants to keep on working on monetization for Wheel of Fun and hopes to complete it soon.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

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