Rocky River High School Junior Austin Wilson won first place in the Creative Mashup portion of The Amazon Alexa API Mashup Contest,” sponsored by Amazon and Hackster.io. This is the second contest Austin has won this school year, having placed second in Amazon’s Raspberry Pi/Alexa Internet of Voice Challenge in September.
To win this most recent contest, Austin created Elite Dangerous Ship Assistant. Elite Dangerous is a video game that involves space exploration, combat, and trading. In the game, which has a virtual reality component, the player sits in a cockpit and controls his or her ship. Using Amazon’s voice-controlled Alexa, Austin created an app that allows a player to control Elite Dangerous with his or her voice.
Austin explains, “What sparked the idea of the app is that I was playing the game, and someone else had already created an app that allowed you to communicate with the game by voice, but it was just audio files. I wanted to create an app in which you could talk to the game and actually have the app understand what’s happening within the game.” As an example, Austin notes that if the player said, “lower landing gear,” and the landing gear was already down, the app that just used audio files would result in the landing gear being raised. In Austin’s app, however, if the player requests that the landing gear be lowered and it already is, the voice responds “I can’t do that. It’s already lowered.” In other words, the app that Austin created knows what is happening in the game, rather than just recognizing various words the player is saying. A player can even ask “Alexa, where am I?” and Alexa will respond with the name of the star and characteristics about the galaxy in which it’s located.
This project took Austin two months, and it actually involves two separate programs: one to package data from third-party sites (in this case, the fan site on which players logged all the stars in the game) and another to send the data.
The contest, Austin explains, was to make Alexa smarter by using tools from a third-party website.
Austin created a YouTube video showing how the Elite Dangerous Ship Assistant works, and in three days the video had over 25,000 views (it’s now past 51,000). That caught the attention of Amazon’s Game Studio, who called Austin about coming to work for them, he says, without even knowing he’d won their company’s own contest. (The other important point they didn’t realize is that Austin is only sixteen years old.) Since that time, his creation has been written about in IBTimes.co.uk, PCMag.com, as well as Popular Mechanics’ blog and the IBM Employee blog.
Austin, son of CWRU research assistant Mike Wilson, won $1,500 and an Amazon Echo, DOT, and Tap. He learned about the contest on the Hackster contest link, which is also where he found out about the previous one. When asked if he’ll be entering whatever contest Hackster announces next, Austin replies, “That depends. Tennis season’s about to start. And I need to start applying to colleges soon.”