Travi

What is your project about?

My project is an Alexa skill that allows users to check travel advisories to foreign countries.

Why did you decide to make it?

The inspiration for the Alexa skill came from my own life experience. During most of my adult life, I have lived overseas in countries most Americans have little knowledge of - Mongolia, Bangladesh, Jordan, Paraguay for example. While in these countries I met numerous other travelers and we all shared something in common - concerned parents. Our parents often wondered where we were traveling and whether we were safe.

I wanted to make a tool that would make it easier for parents to learn more about countries overseas.

How does it work?

Users can check on whether or not there are State Department Travel Warnings simply by asking “is Germany safe?” or “are there State Department travel warnings for Egypt?”

Travi will respond by giving a brief summary of travel warnings for the country. If prompted further, it will give a full summary of the State Department warning.

How did you make it?

After coming up with the initial idea for Travi, I wanted to test some of my assumptions.

I asked friends that traveled if there parents would be willing to talk about a variety of issues that would help be better define the product:

• What did you feel when your children told you they were traveling overseas?

• What did you first research when you were traveling overseas?

• How would you ask an assistant like Alexa these questions?

You can see more of some of this initial research in this video here:

How does it fit the Amazon VUI Best Practices?

I’ve highlighted in my VUI when I adhered to best practices (and a few times when I wanted to err on the side of satisfying the customer).

Lessons Learned

• AWS is very serious when they say random slot values can pass through, so test for that. Early on in my testing I was surprised to find that there were no travel warnings for Narnia. I scratched my head for a while wondering why Narnia wasn't screened out when I re-read the documentation and found that random values can pass through even if you have defined slots.

• Making a VUI map was the most useful thing for testing - both before and after coding. Before, it was useful as a way to trial run conversations with someone. After, it was useful to validate all use cases.

• Don’t forget to check the cards on your Alexa app as part of the debugging process. I was stuck for a while trying to understand why the Service Simulator was succeeding but Alexa on the Echo dot kept failing. It turned out, I was passing data unknowingly beyond the card limit.

• RSS feeds are not ideal for a public voice API. I ended up in trouble with XML a few times. First off, the XML was typically geared towards the written word, not spoken text.

• This project was a lot of fun. I did not find out about it in time to get the skill published, but I didn’t want to pass on the opportunity to try to build a skill!