Alexa Skill

I designed an Amazon Alexa Skill called Make Positivity Louder which has a total of 28 user enablements.

Click HERE to watch a demo!

Why create an Alexa Skill?

I used to host a podcast called Make Positivity Louder.

Each episode was a mash-up of voice messages.

Fans of the show wanted access to the voice messages, so I decided to create a search engine which would enable them to listen to their favorite voice messages whenever they wanted to.

First step?

Identify who would be using this application, for what purpose and in what context.

I designed a user flow with two personas in mind.

A user who wanted to shuffle the entire collection and listen passively while doing something else.

A user who wanted to find a specific voice message and listen intently.

What next?

I had to solve some problems.

I wanted users to be able to shuffle the entire collection without having to say “Alexa, next” in order to play each subsequent voice message, because saying “Alexa, next” over and over is cumbersome.

So, I learned to enqueue audio files in the Alexa Audio Player.

I also wanted users to be able to search for voice messages based on category, so that they could find the voice messages they wanted to hear as quickly as possible.

So, I learned to tag audio files in Amazon S3.

Then what?

I published the Alexa Skill and realized, over the course of the next month, that users were choosing the gratitude category much more than any of the other categories.

This data was available to me in the Amazon Developer Console.

I wanted to save users time, so I altered the welcome message to inform users that they could bypass the welcome message completely and ask for the gratitude category directly in a single query.

For example, “Alexa, ask Make Positivity Louder to play Gratitude.”

Results?

The Make Positivity Louder Alexa Skill has a total of 28 user enablements.