Planetary Travel Quiz, a fun multimodal Alexa skill that recommends planetary travel destinations by measuring responses on a series of questions. I designed visual and spoken responses for Alexa skill cards, as well as audio responses. I added custom welcome, help, stop and cancel, and repeat messages to improve the skill experience.
Design a multimodal (audio and visual) Alexa quiz skill that measures responses on a series of questions and uses them to determine a user personality attribute. The visuals should support the voice experience, and the skills should be easy and fun to play with clear directions.
Using a code template to created the skill, I included a welcome message that tells users how to use the skill and play the quiz, a custom help message, a repeat option for users to hear a question again, and custom help, stop, and cancel messages. I created 9 audio quiz questions and 7 audio results responses, each with complementary visual text and imagery.
A functional and certified audio and visual multimodal personality-based Alexa quiz skill.
These were the most fun to write. Because I worked off a code template, I could change it to create a unique quiz. There are 7 planets other than Earth in our solar system (sorry, Pluto), so I used them as the basis for the results. Each result required a name and an audio message for the voice system to speak, a display name that would show the result visually on the skill card, a background image, and a complementary description.
Next I created the quiz questions. These were yes/no questions weights that mapped to the planet results. I ended up with 9 questions, and like the result responses, each required an audio message, the corresponding text display, and a background image.
Finally, the welcome, help, stop, and question confirmation messages were tailored for the skill.
This was a creative project, and I had a lot of fun with it. It was nice to have visuals that enhanced the voice experience. Although the visual component complemented the audio nicely, it was limited and there was little that could be done with the visual design other than displaying the text. The typeface and font size could not be changed, for example, and the text display would cut off. This was especially awkward if you have longer messages or a message with the result at the end, as in the first skill card image above. Even the shorter question text would often be cut off in the display. It would be nice to be able have more options and features in order to improve the multimodal experience.
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