Alexa Champions

Terren Peterson is an experienced technology executive with over twenty years of experience in consulting, start-up, and large corporate environments. He is currently the head of Platform Engineering for the Retail and Direct Bank Business at Capital One.  

Terren is currently developing interactive voice applications using the Alexa platform. He has created multiple Alexa skills. Most recently, he integrated Alexa Voice Service with a Raspberry Pi to create Roxie, the voice-activated pitching machine that won first place in the Best ASK with Raspberry Pi segment of Alexa’s Internet of Voice Challenge on Hackster.io. Terren is now experimenting with the analytics capabilities of Alexa to understand and improve skill usage.  

Terren holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was the founder of the Digital Campus Lab for Capital One at the UIUC Research Park, and serves on the board of the Hoeft Technology & Management Program. Terren also holds both Architect and Developer AWS Certifications.

• Hurricane Center: This skill provides the latest storm information about tropical storms and hurricanes based on publicly available data from the NOAA. The skill saw extensive use during Hurricane Matthew when it continuously provided updates on the storm location forecast.
• Robot Roxie: This skill can be used in conjunction with a Raspberry Pi, and enables users to instruct a pitching machine to release balls to practice hitting. The skill can also be used to track score in a two player game without a Raspberry Pi. This skill won first place in the Best ASK with Raspberry Pi category of the Alexa Internet of Voice Challenge.
• Colonial History: Looking to learn more about the US Founding Fathers and the era that they lived in? This skill shares interesting historical information, including biographies and leverages Alexa to read historical documents, including the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.
• Beer Bot: Personal assistant to help with beer selection leveraging data and API’s from BreweryDB.com. Provides data from more than a thousand microbreweries across the US.
• March Madness Trivia: This is a challenging trivia game that asks questions about different college basketball tournaments that have occurred over time.
• Scavenger Hunt: This is the modern version of the classic Scavenger Hunt game. Through this game, you are transformed into a secret agent, looking for a series of items found inside and outside of your home.