AN AMAZON ALEXA SKILLBY: TROOP 58 – OCEANPORT, NJ

CREATED FOR THE SUSTAINABLE JERSEYCODING FOR COMMUNITY COMPETITION

My Town Hall

Municipal Need Statement

• The borough of Highland Park, NJ put out a challenge to create a software solution which would “reduce the amount of calls and information requests to municipal staff and be proactive about providing information to citizens”

• Their recommendation was to create an Amazon Alexa Skill, served via an Amazon Echo, Dot or Tap device, which could be placed in the town hall and answer commonly asked questions that people may have

• Specifically we were guided by the borough representative to try to develop a solution which could respond to any question someone may have regarding the town

• Ideally “If you could train Alexa to read our Web site it would be awesome!”

• Other ideas were to include the ability to answer questions dealing with navigating or functioning within the Borough Hall (e.g. How do I get to the Mayor’s office)

Solution Concept

We approached our solution design by considering the ideal scenario requested from the borough (ability to answer any question someone may have about the town)

We wanted to design a solution which could answer questions which were dynamically stored so as to support a flexible question and answer model

Ideally, the towns using this solution should be able to provide their own questions, specific to their town, and their own answers to those questions

However, as we delved into the solution design within the scope of the Amazon Alexa framework, we realized that this ideal scenario would not be achievable due to the specific configuration model required of the framework

An Amazon Alexa Skill functions through the mapping of someone’s speech to specific ‘utterances’ which are configured within the skill, therefore we had to define specific types of questions which could be answered by the skill

We limited the initial prototype to questions about locations/departments and scheduled events within the town, however the design of the solution is highly scalable and extensible, so as to support additional question types as needed

How My Town Hall Works

The solution is deployed into the Amazon Web Services cloud as an Amazon Alexa Skill, which is a service created to provide functionality to the Amazon Alexa artificial intelligence product which is made available through Amazon’s Echo, Dot and Tap devices

The solution is triggered when somebody asks Alexa a question in the form of “Alexa, ask My Town Hall <question>” where <question> is a pre-defined list of phrases which are configured within the skill service

Once triggered, the solution will look up the answer in a cloud hosted database repository, retrieve the answer and relay the answer vocally

For example asking the question “Alexa, ask My Town Hall where is the borough hall?”, the answer would be “The borough hall is located at 221 South 5th Ave”

Asking the question, “Alexa, ask My Town Hall when is the Unity Celebration Event?” the answer would be “The Unity Celebration is on March 26, at 11 AM”

The actual answers given by Alexa would be managed entirely by the town or borough administration

This will impact the communities it serves by providing valuable information to community residents without taking time away from the administration to address commonly asked questions

Solution Architecture

The My Town Hall Alexa Skill is built entirely on within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) eco-system, providing for a cost-effective, scalable infrastructure which fits well within the Amazon Alexa framework

The solution is currently running in the AWS free-tier, with financial charges being suppressed unless there is sufficient load on the system to warrant them

Municipalities looking to leverage the solution could choose an infrastructure configuration within AWS with a pricing model which fits their needs and budget

The solution architecture consists of the following components/layers Amazon Alexa Skill – Set of configurations defining the types of questions that Alexa should expect,

interpreted speech from users, and the service functions to which questions should be directed API Gateway – Provides an web-based end point for Lambda service functions with which the

administrative pages interact Lambda Functions – Services with pre-defined interfaces for supporting Alexa and web-based

requests. Provide the core logic of the solution RDS Database – Cloud hosted database storing the answers to questions provided by municipalities Admin Web Pages – Pages providing a UI for managing the answers to questions. Leverages AJAX

to eliminate the need for deploying to a web server

My Town Hall Deployment

The majority of the solution is deployed and managed in the cloud, however an Amazon Echo, Dot or Tap device would be required to use the solution vocally, as it’s intended

The My Town Hall solution could be deployed in two ways1. Attached to a specific Amazon developer account and configured for use on specific

devices. With this approach, municipalities could place the device(s) in specific buildings (e.g. the town hall) and visitors to those buildings could interact with the system there

2. Deployed publicly for use by residents within their homes. With this model, the solution would need to be extended to support multiple municipalities

In its current state, the device is only supporting one municipality, specifically Highland Park, but the solution could be easily extended to support multiple municipalities. This could be accomplished by doing the following Adding columns to the database tables as necessary to track answers by municipality Supporting the pass-through of municipality identifiers as parameters across the service

layers Modifying the Alexa Skill to prompt a user for their municipality and storing it in a session

variable

Testing the Solution

The My Town Hall skill can be tested without an Amazon Echo device using the Amazon Developer Portal. This portal provides a web interface you can use to type a question and get the response from Alexa. You can access this test interface by following the instructions below Access the Amazon Developer portal at http://developer.amazon.com Login with

Username: oceanporttroop58@gmail.com Password: Su5ta1nabl3

Click on the Alexa tab at the top of the page Under Alexa Skills Kit click Get Started Click on My Town Hall Click on Test on the left Under ‘Enter Utterance’, ask questions like: “What are the hours of the town hall”

(see the questions.txt file in the Troop 58 Google Drive mytownhall/alexa folder for additional questions)

Click on Ask My Town Hall Click on the Listen button in the response panel to hear the answer spoken back

Testing the Administration

Admin pages were created for administering Events and Locations You can find them in the Troop 58 CFC Google Drive folder in

mytownhall/admin as admin-locations.html and admin-events.html You can double click on the files to open them in a web browser

directly as long as you are on a computer that is connected to the internet

Click into a field to update that field, a form field control will be displayed (note: name values are specifically tied to the questions which are asked and cannot be changed via the admin pages)

Changing values will directly change the answers given by Alexa, the pages use AJAX to update the data, so there is no save button required

The pages use an open-source framework called Editablegrid to dynamically render the table used for managing the values, so it may take a second to load

Uniqueness

Our solution is unique because it leverages a new type of technology to address a common issue

The solution can be easily extended functionally, scaled for varying loads of volume and easily adapted for other towns

Information can be easily managed by the administration without the need for additional infrastructure

It was created by a group of boy scouts from Troop 58 in Oceanport as part of a Programming merit badge program

Any questions/issues please contact John Fleming at jflemingnj@gmail.com

Thank you

DEMO PRESENTATION

My Town Hall

AN AMAZON ALEXA SKILLBY: TROOP 58 – OCEANPORT, NJ

CREATED FOR THE SUSTAINABLE JERSEYCODING FOR COMMUNITY COMPETITION

My Town Hall Demo Presentation

Highland Park Challenge

Line for Borough Clerk

I just need to know

where the mayor’s office is!

Highland Park Solution

Line for Borough Clerk

I just need to know

where the mayor’s office is!

To get to the mayor’s

office, do downstairs and make a

right, proceed…

Solution Architecture

AMAZON

ALEXA DEVICE

API GATEWAY

LAMBDA FUNCTION

S

RDS DB

SECURE AMAZON AWS ECO -SYSTEM

Project Approach

Challenge selectionDiscussed steps in software designIncluded concepts from scouting

Programming merit badge programSolution DesignCoded in StagesTestingPresentation

Locations/Departments

Information provided based on Address, Phone, Hours for locations & departments

Questions can be asked in different ways When is the library open? What are the hours of the library?

Data managed through admin page https://sites.google.com/site/troop58oceanport/documents/admin

-locations.html

Events/Calendar

Description, Dates, Times, Location, Contact InfoInformation about an event

What is the unity celebration event? Where is the unity celebration event? Who can I talk to about the unity celebration event?

Information about a timeframe What’s happening next week? Timeframe options: this week, next week, this month, next month,

today, tomorrow

Data managed through admin page https://sites.google.com/site/troop58oceanport/documents/admin-events.html

One-Off Question and Answer

One-off questions and answers How do I get to the mayor’s office?

Adding new events, locations, questions requires updates to Alexa skill and database

Data managed through admin page https://sites.google.com/site/troop58oceanport/documents/admin

-questions.html

Next Steps

Additional features required Dynamic Management of Questions Multi-Town Support Security Data Validation Refine Alexa App Presentation

Deployment Single Account per Town Public Certification via Amazon Varying Cost Model based on Utilization and Device(s)

Thank You!

Questions??