What is trump doing right now Alexa Skill
Motivation
I was motivated to start this project because I noticed that Trump was in the news at least once a day at the time of writing this skill. Also I wanted to build my first publicly usable Alexa Skill and get the Alexa Developer T-Shirt.
Architecture
The skill is built with the flask-ask framework and deployed via zappa to AWS Lambda to provide easy serverless hosting without maintanence.
How it works
The app pulls news data from a newsapi.org and depending on wether it is a German or English speaking user gets these news headline from Spiegel News or Google News. It then filters the news for certain keywords like “Trump” and reads back the relevant news headlines as voice interface friendly as possible. It also supports Stop,Cancel and Help intents as specified in the Alexa Guidelines.
User feedback
Although I created the skill just for fun and within a few days to get a glimpse of Alexa Voice Development it received pretty good usage numbers and utterances in its first few months after publishing.
By now it suffers from a problem many Alexa skills face: user retention. It still gets used by some but only around 5 users daily.
