During our summer hackathon, we challenged our community to build Amazon Alexa skills. As usual, we were blown away at the results. This blogpost will announce the winners and showcase some of our favorite submissions.
🥇 Interview Genie (1st place)
The project that won first place was submitted by Vibhuv Sharma (randomcodingboy). They built "an A.I. powered amazon Alexa skill that helps prepare you for an interview by giving you a wide range of general and topic specific questions. It goes one step further than most interview question banks by utilizing A.I. to generate the questions, assess your response, and provide sample responses. InterviewGenie can help you elevate your performance on any and every job interview."
The application was built on Replit using Node.js, the Alexa ask SDK, and OpenAI's GPT-3.
Vibhuv is a rising 8th grader who has been coding for a little over a year.
🥈 Cactus Carer (2nd place)
The project that won second place was submitted by a Replit user named Coding Cactus. "When you own a cactus, one of the first things you think is that cacti don't need to be watered. This is wrong! Cacti need to be watered around once a week, and fed around once a month. This skill allows you to track your waterings and feedings for multiple cacti and tells you what you need to do and when to keep them healthy."
In addition to their skill, they built an accompanying website that explains the skill and even lets you view some information about your Cacti.
🥉 Minelexa (3rd place)
The project that won third place was submitted by Mohammad Awwad (awwad). "My skill allows you to find a crafting guide on any craftable item in minecraft. I made this skill because I am always the type of person to ask friends how to craft items in minecraft as I extremely dislike the built in crafting guide notebook system in minecraft. This made me want to make things even easier so I made so that you simply ask Alexa how to craft something, then poof you get all the information and ingredients you need including a picture, my skill is also compatible with screens that can be connected to an Alexa"
The project was built using the Beautiful Soup Python library. He was able to web scrape a single website that contained all of the information needed to craft items in Minecraft. The response is also used to create an actual image that can be used on Alexa devices with screens.
Mohammad is 16 years old and has been programming for around 5 years.
Honorable mentions
In no particular order, here are a handful of other submissions that we liked:
Discord Alexa
Mikkel Ringaud (vexcited) built an audio interface for Discord. You can read notifications and send messages -- all through your Alexa!
Talking Media
Winston Ado-Kofie (cooljames1610) built a audio-only social media. Using your voice,you can create an account and send messages to other users on the platform. He says that he is working on adding more features like a more robust profile system and the ability to follow users.
Repl Info
Oleg Bilovus (argopanoptes) built an Alexa skill that gets various information about Replit such as the price of our hacker plan, our server status, and the hottest post on ReplTalk!
GeoCube
Sean Brown (geocube101) built an Alexa skill + a python tkinter app that lets you download files onto your computer with your voice.
Conclusion
To all the participants - thank you! This hackathon could not have happened without all of your creativity and hard work. We are continually amazed at how far people are able to push the boundaries of Replit.
If you are interested in participating in our next community event, check out KaJam.
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