HackerEarth, a leader in innovation and talent management, has announced the launch of its first virtual AI hackathon for Alexa. This unique hackathon is aimed at building more engaging skills for Alexa, which is the cloud-based voice service and brain behind Alexa-enabled devices, including the Amazon Echo.
Registration for the hackathon is open now. The contest will encourage developers to think outside of the traditional application development approach and embrace a voice-first design approach. The participants will be given access to the Alexa Skills Kit, a set of free, self-service, public APIs, that developers can utilize to easily create new experiences for Alexa. The existing architecture allows developers to build applications or skills to enhance the customer experience for its users. The Alexa Skills Kit [ASK] is a useful tool for independent developers, designers and brands to create new ways to engage Alexa.
The hackathon is being conducted keeping in mind that the resulting skills will be useful for the end users. For this reason, it is an open themed hackathon where participants can build any skill that can benefit Alexa customers. Participants are encouraged to create business productivity solutions, cool games, engaging chat bots, smart home applications or anything else that users might be looking for.
To get started, participants can have a look at the existing skills in the Alexa India skills store. There are over 12,000 skills in the store across multiple categories including Business & Finance, Food & Drink, Games, Music & Audio. Over the past few months, Alexa developers from across India added a localized flavor to the skills, enabling customers to listen to devotional songs like Hanuman Chalisa and Gayatri Mantra, find out diverse information ranging from Indian pin codes, Indian presidents to Indian Railways PNR status, or play Indian Tambola, Mahabharatha quiz and Indian GK Quiz. Lifestyle and Entertainment skills like ‘Rock Paper Scissors’, ‘Ganesha Speaks’, ‘Find My Phone’ and ‘Help me Sleep’ are among the most popular skills within Indian customers. This hackathon will give participants an opportunity to work on voice-controlled skills that will make Alexa smarter.
Alexa is currently being used for myriad applications including ordering food and transportation, controlling a smart home, playing music, and much more. Popular services such as Ola, Zomato, Saavn and The Times of India have also identified the potential of voice-enabled customer-interactions early on and provide their services to users through Alexa and Echo devices.
The registration process of this hackathon will conclude on April 1st, 2018. All teams that qualify will be required to submit a working skill based on their idea by April 15th, 2018. All skill submissions that pass the skills qualification process by April 21st, 2018 will get published to the India skill store and will be readily available for users to install on their Alexa app. Teams can also add other language support [e.g. EN-US] to make their skills available to the global skill stores, however participants must register themselves as India vendors and publish their skills to the India store to qualify for the competition.
The name of winning team will be announced on May 1st, 2018. The jury for the hackathon includes senior leadership from Amazon and Alexa Skills business in India. The winning teams will also be awarded cash prizes, devices including Amazon Echo and Amazon Kindle and will also get to meet senior team members from Alexa Skills team in India.
Sprint, HackerEarth’s innovation management software is a platform to ideate and collaborate on interesting products, solutions and processes. It also helps organizations to crowd source solutions, from internal and external audiences, helping them minimize the time, effort and capital spent on driving innovation. HackerEarth also hosts a global network of top developers which companies and governments can tap into through Sprint, to generate ideas and solutions. Organizations use Sprint to crowd source ideas that help them meet larger goals, which are broken down into distinct themes and specific campaigns.
- Registration and Idea Submission: 20 February – 1 April 2018
- Skills submission phase: 2 April – 15 April 2018
- Skills certification phase on Alexa Skill Store: 16 April – 21 April 2018
- Judging: 22 April – 28 April 2018
- Winner announcement: 1 May 2018