Alexa skill for Duke Bus times.
Launch the Flask server:
python server.py
To start a HTTP tunnel on port 5000, run this next:
./ngrok http 5000
Use the generated https address as your endpoint in the Alexa skill dashboard.
Session Status online
Session Expires 6 hours, 1 minute
Version 2.2.8
Region United States (us)
Web Interface http://127.0.0.1:4040
Forwarding http://<sessionid>.ngrok.io -> localhost:5000
Forwarding https://<sessionid>.ngrok.io -> localhost:5000
At this point, you'll have a running developer build. On your personal Alexa or through the developer console you can say things like:
- Launch Blue Devil Buses
- Ask Blue Devil Buses for West Campus Bus Stop
to request information. I've built out a really primitive interaction model that gives information for a certain stop. You can also deploy to AWS. There's a pretty good tutorial here that'll get you most of the way there.
I've already deployed the skill to the store under the utterance "Duke Bus Times." Feel free to check it out!
I'm not sure how much work I'll put into this. In it's current state it serves its purposes pretty well. In the future it might be fun to build out some of the following features.
- Alarm (e.g. notify me when a bus is 3 minutes from the stop..)
- Default stop settings (Amazon doesn't let you store information across sessions. I think this would involve a custom database w/ userID's and user preferences which is more trouble than it's worth.)
- Nearest stops, right now the skill just has a hand-selected list of popular stops. It might be more useful to grab the Alexa's location using the Device Address API and list the nearest stops.
- More Transit agencies, right now the skill is bespoke to Duke transit. It would be trivial to add more schools or generalize the app, but this would complicate the interaction model.