We wanted to understand how to produce effective interactions for voiced-based interfaces and natural language processing, so we decided to produce two Alexa skills around content which we are passionate about: Star Wars and comics.
Our Star Wars Alexa Skill, Star Archives, provides all kinds of information about the Star Wars universe; users can ask Alexa about galaxies, starships, weapons, and characters. To begin we created an interaction model on what users can ask Alexa. The schema considered everything we believed users would be willing to ask out loud and receive the information via “spoken” voice. Our Comic Book Guide Alexa Skill is nearly identical with respect to capabilities, techniques used, and challenges experienced.
We got a few RadBeacons to play around with, so we integrated them with Slack to create a "check-in" feature that alerts team members via Slack when someone gets into the office.
Our interns explored creating a chatbot using IBM's Watson API to onboard new employees and answer their employment and HR-related questions.