Alexa Dining Skill - Gettysburg College
2016 - 2017“Alexa, what is the Lunch menu for the Dinning Center on Thursday?”
He owned an Amazon Echo, which he and his housemates in Blue Note used pretty often, and decided to research how to become an Amazon Developer. He found himself busy with classes, but while he was abroad in England the following semester he had some free time on his hands.
He chose to spend his free time pursuing the project that had sparked his interest the previous semester, and quickly got started on making his idea a reality.
He contacted the Gettysburg IT department and the Vice President of Information Technology, Rodney Tosten, replied back to him. He offered Ehly a job writing a program code for the skill. After months of writing code and planning, the feature was ready to be put into action. Click here to read more
What does it do?
Well it doesn’t make the food if that’s what you’re thinking. The Gettysburg College Dining Alexa skill allows Gettysburg College students to ask their Alexa enabled devices what is on the menu at certain dining locations on campus.
How does it work?
The college posts the dining information every week here (Note that if this link doesn’t work the skill might also not work). The skill parses through the HTML on the website in order to get it into a format that I could easily query and then I format in a way users would like to hear. Everything is written in Java and is hosted on Amazon’s AWS.
How do you use it?
After enabling the skill in Amazon’s Alexa skill marketplace, users can begin using the skill. Users must specifiy what dining center they want and the date. For example a user might say “Alexa, ask Gettysburg College Dining get menu information for the Dining Center on Tuesday.” Users also have the choice to specifiy if they want Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner information (by default Dinner is chosen).