Forum:NB:Wookieepedia-powered Alexa app idea

Hey guys, longtime fan and former editor/admin here. I've been working on a Wookieepedia idea recently, and I wanted to run it by a smaller group of people in the community to start with. I've got a prototype put together of a voice-powered "skill" for Alexa (basically a free app for Amazon's Echo speakers). I know voice assistants like Alexa and Siri aren't for everyone, but I feel like this is a good use of the wiki and heck, maybe it could generate some positive press for Wookieepedia if it works well. The idea started off with a question, "What happened today in Star Wars history?" Wookieepedia is a great source for that, because we've already got pages for every day of the year! So to start with, if I published this app in it's most basic format, you could ask questions like:


 * "Alexa, ask Wookiee what happened today."
 * "Alexa, ask Wookiee what happened on April 30."

There's room for some improvements like pronunciation of Star Wars-specific words, but this part actually works pretty well already! If the community likes this idea, I'd probably try to invoke this skill with phrases like "Alexa, ask Wookieepedia..." instead of "Alexa, ask Wookiee," assuming Alexa can properly understand the word "Wookieepedia" (it does just fine with "Wookiee").

My next step that more or less works is fetching random articles: "Alexa, ask Wookiee for something random." This still needs improvement before it's ready for prime time, but it's pretty fun, just like clicking the Random article link. Finally, my long-term stretch goal would be to ask questions like, "Alexa ask Wookiee about Yoda," and it would read you parts of the article. The tricky bit here is that Alexa can't transcribe Star Wars names nicely -- it even has trouble transcribing some simple spoken phrases -- so I don't know how feasible it is aside from some standard English names and words.

I'd love to get the community behind this to make it more official if we think it's a good idea. Also, anyone with an Amazon account can send me their email address to help with beta testing (there are even online services like https://echosim.io to fake an Alexa if you don't have the physical device). Let me know what you think of the idea. Cheers! —Xwing328 (Talk) 04:56, June 14, 2017 (UTC)