Build a Talking Dictionary with Alexa

In this blog post, I present a tutorial to build a voice activated Oxford dictionary using Amazon Alexa. You can talk to the dictionary and ask for definitions, example usage, synonyms or antonyms of any English word present in the Oxford dictionary. After reading this post, you should be able to build yourself and enjoy this voice controlled dictionary or even give it as a gift to your kids!

Overview

Often I stumble across some word from a classic English literature. I get hold of a dictionary, locate the word and then read the print in a tiny font. Oh yes I can google for that word on my smartphone and then quickly get lost in the social media world on the phone. Besides, none of these things really interact with me. What if I have a gadget to which I can literally ask about the word and it tells me the meaning and even example usage of that word?

Dictionary Bot

This idea seemed fascinating and after a bit of research, I was able to successfully build a talking dictionary bot. The dictionary bot listens to my questions about meaning, synonyms, antonyms of any English word and gets answers straight from the definitive record for English language - The Oxford Dictionary.

This blog post is an effort to document the building process for this Voice controlled Oxford Dictionary Bot.

This post was originally published on my old blog AbsZeroBlog.

Introduction to Amazon Alexa

Alexa doesn’t really need an introduction. For those of you who don’t know, Alexa is a voice service from Amazon which provides a Voice User Interface (VUI) for you to interact with the world. Alexa can answer questions about weather, facts, history or play music, set alarm. You can access Alexa service with the hands-free smart speaker Echo or similar products from Amazon.

In addition, Amazon has put the power of Alexa in the hands of developers. To leverage the artificial intelligence behind Alexa, you develop a skill to add more capabilities and features of your own to Alexa.

In this project, we will develop such a custom skill so that Alexa is able to retrieve and present you the information from Oxford dictionary for your query. If you are interested to know more about Alexa, here is a good information to start with.

Hardware

Amazon Echo is the device which comes to mind when you think of Alexa. However, that is not the only option to access Alexa voice service. You can get a feel of Alexa with some web based simulators such as echosim.io or the You can run the service on a Raspberry Pi, if you belong to the maker clan and enjoy DIY.

Co-incidentally I received a beta sample of WisCore AVS Kit from RAK wireless, a Shenzhen based company manufacturing wide range of products to build IoT solutions. WisCore integrates Alexa Voice Service inside it, so you can use it almost out of the box to interact with Alexa. A companion mobile app lets you configure WisCore with your Amazon credentials and you are all set to experience the digital voice assistant. WisCore has several features and capabilities in addition to Alexa integration. You can find out more about WisCore and ordering information from here.

In this project, I used WisCore to develop the talking dictionary.

Architecture

This image shows the architecture of our voice controlled talking dictionary application. In addition to Alexa voice service, we will use Heroku web service to host the skill code and most importantly the Oxford dictionary API. A brief description of these components follows.

Oxford Dictionary API

Everyone of us at some point has used an Oxford dictionary, though in a physical form. But what makes our voice controlled dictionary bot possible is the online presence of this dictionary with an easy to use API to access its contents. You can simply query the dictionary and retrieve tremendous information about English language including grammar and word origins as well. The API calls return information in a friendly JSON format so you can use programming language of your choice. Oxford provides code snippets for Python, Java, Swift and Objective-C. You can get more details about the API and its capabilities here.

Heroku

Heroku is a great platform to build, deploy and manage web apps. The orchestration code for Alexa skill needs to be hosted as a web service since Alexa can’t access your local code. The web service should provide an https endpoint which needs to be configured in the Alexa skill. We will use Heroku to host our Alexa skill code. Heroku offers an easy interface to manage a web app and it supports various programming languages such as node.js, python, ruby etc. Heroku runs the app inside smart containers in a fully managed runtime environment so all you need is to push your code via GIT to the Heroku server.

Dictionary Bot in Action

Let’s get straight to see a demo of our voice activated Oxford dictionary.

Here is a brief about what happens behind the screen when you use the voice activated oxford dictionary bot.

• Wiscore runs a wakeword engine which keeps scanning your speech for the wakeword Alexa.
• Once the wakeword engine detects this wakeword, it transfers the further speech to Amazon so the Alexa voice service can decode it and act accordingly.
• When you say, Alexa, ask Oxford the definition of vivid, Alexa voice service interprets that this request is for a skill named Oxford.
• It then parses your speech into intent (Asking for definition) and slots (the word vivid) and passes these to our skill endpoint which is the app running on Heroku.
• The skill code running on Heroku web service in turn calls appropriate API from Oxford dictionary to retrieve the definition of word vivid.
• The skill code then parses the JSON data received from Oxford. It converts the parsed data into a meaningful sentence which forms the speech to be passed back to WisCore. Using SSML tags, it also adds expressiveness to the speech.
• Finally the skill code passes back the resulting speech to WisCore which you hear from the connected speaker.

The skill code speaks out how many definitions it found in the oxford dictionary and tells you all the definitions along with an example usage as well. You can go ahead and further customize the code to speak more or little of the data returned by Oxford dictionary API.

Let’s Build It

If you find this idea exciting, let’s go ahead and start building the voice controlled dictionary bot. Entire source code and instructions to build this app are provided on Github. Follow the instructions provided in the README file to build yourself this talking dictionary.

Here is an outline of the building process.

1. Create required accounts
2. Setup Wiscore AVS Kit
3. Create and configure Alexa skill
4. Create, configure and deploy Heroku web app
5. Provide the Heroku endpoint to Alexa skill
6. Enjoy talking to your Dictionary Bot

Conclusion

The voice activated dictionary bot presented in this tutorial uses only a subset of the rich API provided by Oxford dictionary. There are numerous possibilities to extend the feature set and capabilities of this bot. A potential use case may be to develop a translation app of your own as Oxford provides translations to a few supported languages.

Additionally, you can think of leveraging the features of WisCore board. The hardware of WisCore features far-field recognition which means that you can talk to it from a distance of almost 15 feet. With multiple microphones, it can locate the direction of sound as well. Moreover, it has got additional peripherals on board such as Ethernet, USB, UART, SPI, I2C and a number of GPIO pins. Together with Raspberry Pi or Arduino you can develop rich voice controlled products using WisCore.

So go ahead and have fun ! Do let me know if you replicate this project.