"Press-up Coach" is an Alexa skill I created to help me get back into fitness. I wanted something that would encourage me to do press-ups every day.

A big challenge with Alexa development is optimizing voice over visuals/touch/type. Many skills don’t leverage the platform’s strengths, trying to replicate other mediums' experiences.

When considering voice-first use cases, I thought about where traditional interfaces, like phone apps, are cumbersome. For example, in the gym, constantly putting my phone in and out of my pocket was inconvenient. Though a smart speaker in the gym seemed unlikely, it inspired me to use voice for tracking spontaneous workouts like press-ups, ideal for morning exercises or work breaks.

So Press-up Coach became a virtual coach always ready to record your reps, offer encouragement, and inform you about your progress.

I made "World Changers" as an entry into an Amazon Alexa skills hackathon. The theme was education and inspiration. My idea was that the unique voice interface provided a great opportunity to reinforce the idea that you can't judge the impact someone will have based on trivial things like their appearance or background.

This game was a relatively simple trivia game where you had to guess the person based on a series of clues. However, each clue started with something simple like date of birth or country of origin and then gradually became more specific to their achievements. The hope was that it would paint a picture that, although those first clues could narrow it down if you had prior knowledge, on their own, they said absolutely nothing about the field, impact, or type of change they would make.

This project was a great opportunity to really focus on how we present information, the biases we all hold, and how important it is to tackle them head on.

Pet Bot was an Alexa skill I created for myself. I have a terrible memory and a lot of cats. I found myself often worried about what they could and couldn't eat and whether sharing a small piece of my food with them was ok. This always happened when eating, clearing, or preparing food when it wasn't ideal to look it up. So, instead, I created a skill that would let me ask Alexa if a certain food was safe for cats.

I also added a few other features like a cat fact and a cat name generator, and information on social habits for your pets. I then extended it to other common pets like dogs, rabbits, and hamsters.

At this time, some of my friends were really into the quiz platform Sporcle. In particular, quizzes around countries and capitals (a trend that has weirdly endured moving on to things like Globle).

Wanting to join in with this interest but being absolutely terrible at geography, I created an Alexa skill to answer once and for all who was the capital master. Even after development, I could barely tell my countries and capitals apart, but it went down a treat with the group who would switch places taking the crown every few days.

Having been working on Splain for a while, I wanted a way to showcase its power to less technical friends. And in the spirit of camaraderie, this manifested as an Alexa app called "The Opinion Minion" which would insult (or compliment) them on command.

Sitting as a thin layer of abstraction on top of a "Splain" dictionary, it was able to generate a huge variety of weird, cutting, and sometimes downright hilarious insults, as well as a few heartfelt compliments.

Here are some favorites:

"Do you think it's ok to smile like that?"

"Your life is unsightly; please stop trying."

"I don't think you should feel good about the way you walk, it's not good and makes you look awkward. Is it really a good idea to make those choices?"

"You look like someone who would be a good shoulder to cry on; I think you would make a good boss. Things would be better if you lived with me."