Adrian Bolinger

My first Alexa skill "from scratch"...

Apr 17, 2016

Designing a Skill

While games and trivia are fun, I think the real-life use model for ambient computing devices will be retrieving information whose usefulness has a short shelf-life.

My Skill

That said, I always find it to be a pain to track down security line wait times at the airport–that’s going to be my skill. Normally I could care less about TSA wait times, but when I need the information it’s always a gigantic PITA to track down the website and jump through the user inteface hoops to get the information. I was surprised this infomation is published in XML format from the TSA, it’s published consistenly, and without a ton of credentialling to access it.

Voice Interaction Model

Intent Schema

I think I’ll have three custom intents:

  1. getWaitTimeByAirportCode
  2. getWaitTimeByAirportName
  3. getWaitTimeByCityAndState

and three vanilla intents like:

  1. AMAZON.HelpIntent
  2. AMAZON.StopIntent
  3. AMAZON.CancelIntent

Sample Utterances

My sample utterances will preliminarily consist of the following:

  • “What is the wait time for [airportCode]?”
  • “What is the wait time for [airportName]?”
  • “What is the wait time for [airportCity], [airportState]?”

Visual Representation of the Menu/Model

Below is a “physics for poets” representation of what the the model will look like for retrieving information. Based on the XML files I’ve looked at, there will be a two special cases to address, such as:

  1. cities with multiple airports and
  2. airports with multiple security checkpoints.

Imgur

Companion App Cards

I’m not going to include companion cards with my app, as my primary objective is to not to manually interact with a physical device.