DevMesh

Alexa Skill for Kids

Manisha Biswas

Manisha Biswas

Kolkata, WB

1 0

A voice and visual interface that will help children to learn and interact with gestures and voice before they start speaking words or even be able to read/understand alphabets. This skill aims to bring to children some games which a child can play and learn from using his/her voice or gestures to provide input from. ...learn more

Project status: Under Development

Game Development, Artificial Intelligence, PC Skills

Groups
Early Innovation for PC Skills

Intel Technologies
Intel Python, OpenVINO

Overview / Usage

With the rise is the number of interfaces geared for children rising up, a common concern is the method of interaction for the kids with the devices. To be able to use a keyboard, a kid must be able to understand the alphabet printed on the keyboard, along with the understanding of how it is used to feed input to the computer/tablet device.

This can be a hurdle when dealing with smaller children who cannot understand the keyboard interface. Also, the keyboard input interface does not help a kid develop his/her vocal ability. A voice or visual interface can help overcome these problems in a manner based on the fact that children first learn to interact with gestures and voice before they start speaking words or even be able to read/understand alphabets.

This skill under development aims to bring to children some games which a child can play and learn from using his/her voice or gestures to provide input from. The following games have been proposed -

  1. Spellings
    • Children are told a word by Alexa and they have to spell out the word verbally.
  2. Number Crunching
    -Simple arithmetic questions are posed to the children and they can answer via hand gestures for numbers or by voice.
  3. Country Flags
    -Flags are shown to the children who can then use their voice to tell the country that flag belongs to
  4. Rhymes
    • Alexa reads aloud poems and the children follow Alexa in rhyming it.

Being able to play these brain-training games using voice and gestures is a very intuitive and child-oriented way of providing knowledge to the children. The scores of the child can be tracked for evaluation of performance trends and growth of the child in terms of knowledge. Also, the mini-games presented can be made to get tougher as the child clears rounds with more efficiency and speed.

Methodology / Approach

On initiating the skill, the child is asked about the game he/she wants to play. As per choice, the method used is as follows -

  1. For Spellings:
    a. Alexa speaks out a word.
    b. Child speaks in the alphabets for the words.
    c. Alexa tells the correct spelling, along with the word’s meaning

  2. Maths
    a. Alexa displays and reads out a simple arithmetic expression.
    b. Child can speak out the answer or gesture it, which is converted to text using model trained by Intel OpenVINO toolkit.
    c. Alexa tells the right answer

  3. Country Flags
    a. Alexa shows country flags
    b. Alexa provides hints if asked for
    c. Child guesses answer using voice
    d. Alexa tells the right answer and a bit about the country

  4. Rhymes
    a. Child chooses which rhyme he/she wants to play
    b. Alexa reads out the rhyme
    c. Child reads out along with Alexa

Technologies Used

  • Alexa Skills for PC
  • Intel OpenVino Toolkit for hand gesture detection
  • Various APIs for fetching Country Flags, Rhymes, Spellings
  • Unity game SDK for Alexa

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