Local Finalist in Alexa Skills Challenge Invited to Amazon Headquarters

Marshfield, WI (OnFocus) Software engineer Doug Forst will be heading to Amazon headquarters in Seattle for an exclusive summit early next year after being chosen as one of ten finalists in an Alexa Skills challenge.

Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa, the female voice behind its Echo Dot smart speaker and related products, can carry out tens of thousands of additional requests through the downloading of “Skills.”

The Alexa Skills competition this fall challenged coders to build or update an app that can offer Amazon customers In-Skill purchasing options.

Forst developed his Alexa app, My Rewards, as a way to reward kids for good behavior. To use the app, parents say “Alexa, give John two stickers” to add virtual rewards — which also include footballs, unicorns, and cookies — to their child’s list.

Parents can translate the virtual rewards into tangible benefits for well-behaved kids. After earning 10 virtual rewards, Forst’s kids are given $5, for example. In response to bad behavior, the rewards can be removed with another command.

“The kids definitely get upset when you take one away,” he said.

Forst was introduced to Alexa after purchasing an Alexa Show, a touchscreen-based device, to compare to a free app he’d developed called eFamilyBoard. With the purchase of a monitor and ChromeBit, families can download boards featuring calendars, to-do lists, daily news, weather, and stickers for kids.

It soon became clear to him that the capabilities of Alexa outstripped the eFamilyBoard. “Me being a software engineer, I thought I could build a Skill, aka app, for Alexa and basically replace that sticker board that we have on eFamilyBoard with this app,” Forst said.

For the competition, Forst set to work developing his first-ever Alexa Skill that would include the possibility for user upgrades. My Rewards is free up to two recipients who can be granted 10 total rewards. If parents want to add unlimited users and rewards, they can upgrade to a Pro account.

The top ten finalists received a cash prize and an invitation to a one-day Alexa ISP Finalist Summit in January, which gives participants from different parts of the world a chance to meet the Alexa team, attend a workshop with experts to learn how to advance their apps, and tour the Amazon campus.

Developers were given feedback to improve the apps for the next judging round. A winner will be selected Jan. 8 for the grand prize of $15,000.

Moving ahead with My Rewards, Forst plans to add a feature which would track how many days in a row a reward was earned. He also wants to add support for other languages besides English.

My Rewards can be enabled for free through Amazon.com.

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