The Stanley Cup playoffs are underway—a perfect time to share the new Fantasy Scoreboards skill built by Macadamian, an international UX design and software development firm with offices in the U.S., Canada, Armenia, and Romania. Using the skill on NHL-connected Fantasy Scoreboards devices that are paired with an Amazon Echo or Fire TV, now Alexa can tell you the score of a specific game, what games are coming up, who played yesterday and even lets you set your favorite team. Here’s a demo of the skill in action.
As described by Chief Architect Martin Larochelle, voice mapping was an important component of making the user experience as natural as possible, given that fans refer to their teams in many different ways—e.g., “Montreal,” “Canadiens,” and “the Habs.” Macadamian identified about 150 variations for the 30 NHL teams, and configured two maps. The first contains all the possible values mapped to a unique team code—e.g., MTL for the Montreal Canadiens—and the second specifies how Alexa says the name of a team—in the case above, “Montreal Canadiens.”
Because the city of New York has two teams, Macadamian needed to create an extension that supports resolving to multiple values. As a result, if a user asks for the score for “New York,” Alexa can ask for further clarification by responding, “Do you mean the Islanders or Rangers?”
The Macadamian crew discovered that in some domain-specific cases, the Alexa sample utterances needed alternate spellings to make the voice recognition work. As an example, initially Alexa couldn’t distinguish between “the Avs” (nickname for the Colorado Avalanche) and “the Habs” (Montreal Canadiens). With Avs as a value in the custom slot, Alexa always thought the user said “Habs,” even when testing in a noise-free room with a native English speaker. What solved the problem was to spell the nickname Avs as Aves.
Martin says that, in the beginning, the detection of “Canadiens” was not as reliable as desired. Again, the solution was to add Canadians as one of the slot values (although, interestingly, Alexa always sends Canadiens as the spelling).
Read Martin’s blog post for more tips on resolving “fuzzy entry” points using the session.attributes functionality of Alexa Skill Kit (ASK) and adding special handling for misheard values with hexadecimal numbers.
If you have a Fantasy Scoreboards device and want to check out this skill, say “Alexa, ask Fantasy Scoreboards what games are playing today?”
Share other innovative ways you’re using Alexa in your life. Tweet us @alexadevs with hashtag #AlexaDevStory.