Alexa-Projects

The project contains the Alexa Practice projects for Beginners ( Python - Flask Ask)

Project 1 : Alexa Word Game Level : Beginner Effort : 2 hour

To be honest, I spent more time to get this word game working as I am new to Python Programming and Alexa. I faced issues (see below) while installing the Flask-ask package in my machine and then understaning the Alexa : Intent , Slot and Utterences. Once I understood , it looked very simple program.

The App works as below :

1. Me:  Alexa , Play Word Game
2. Alexa  : Hello There, Would you like to play the word game
3. Me. : Lets Play
4. Alexa : The Word Starts with the letter  - {a...z}
5. Me : Is it {....} ?
	If the guess is correct : 
		6. Alexa : Supper , you guessed it right. The word is {...}
	If the guess is InCorrect :
		7. Alex : Sorry It is correct. Do you want Clue ?
		8. Me : First Clue Please?
		9. Alex : { .....}  Ex : It is wild animal.
		10. Me : Is it {...} ?
			If the guess is correct : 
				11. Alexa : Supper , you guessed it right. The word is {...}
			If the guess is InCorrect :
				12. Alex : Sorry It is correct. Do you want  Clue ?
				13. Me : Second Clue Please?
				14. Alex : { .....}  Ex : It is an National Animal of India.
				15. Me : Is it {....} ?
				If the guess is correct : 
					16. Alexa : Supper , you guessed it right. The word is {...}
				If the guess is InCorrect :
					17. Alexa : Sorry Better luck next time. The Word is {.....}
	18. Me : I give up
	19.Alexa : The Word is {....}

Before jumping into action for the project , I would suggest you to go through the basics of

  1. Flask_Ask package and it is minimum required code structure.
  2. Alexa - Launch Intent , Built-In Intent , Custom Intent , Fall Back Intent

Issues Faced:

  1. During installation of Flask-ask , I was getting the “python setup.py egg_info” failed with error code 1”. However this was resolved after degrading the PIP version 9.0.3. ( pip3 install pip=9.0.3)

  2. Next error was related to Cryptograpy package version. The current version of cryptograpy was not supporting my code . Hence I had to degrade it to <2.2 which resolved my error. ( pips install cryptograpy< 2.2)

References :

  1. https://flask-ask.readthedocs.io/
  2. https://pythonprogramming.net/testing-deploying-alexa-skill-flask-ask-python-tutorial/?completed=/headlines-function-alexa-skill-flask-ask-python-tutorial/

Backend Server options

The application needs a webserver where the Wordgame logic is running. I could think of below options to acheive this:( but we have more)

  1. Your local machine as webserver with .ngrok to serve the traffic on SSL
  2. Host your Python application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk
  3. Host your Application on AWS Lamda
  4. Host your Application on Pythonanywhere PAAS cloud