Congrats to the Alexa API Mashup Contest Winners!

Last fall, we teamed up with our friends at Amazon to launch the Alexa API Mashup Contest, which called upon Makers and developers to create compelling new voice experiences by connecting their favorite public APIs to Alexa.

Three months, 893 participants, and 216 projects later, we are excited to announce the winners of the challenge, awarding the most creative and most useful API mashups with some pretty sweet prizes.

Most Creative API Mashups

Have you ever played a game, perhaps a virtual reality game, and wondered, “What if I could use my voice as my controller?” That question inspired my idea to implement Alexa into my space ship in Elite Dangerous, an exploration, trading, and combat game, in which you can explore the Milky Way Galaxy on a galactic scale.

There’s something inherently fascinating about vehicles that can fly. The way they defy gravity and take to the skies with three-dimensional freedom is a truly amazing feat of human engineering. Many a child- and also many of us old enough to have a child of our own- love to watch airplanes criss-crossing overhead. But what if instead of passively watching them go by and speculating about their manufacturer, model, owner, and altitude, we could actually ask and find out about those attributes?

One Card Poker is a fast-paced card game for Alexa. Can you predict if your unknown card can beat Alexa’s revealed card? Play for fun or use it to train your card-counting abilities to increase your odds of winning!

Most Useful API Mashups

The Virtual Librarian provides reading suggestions based on the NY Times Bestsellers List, I Dream Books Critically Acclaimed List and the most recent Edgar Award Nominees. Users are able to get a description of each book on a list and find similar books by the author. Users can also look for books by author.

Request a specific U.S. national park to get a brief sound clip of a typical activity or sight at the park, followed by a description of the park provided by the NPS API. You can then ask for location, general directions, or the current weather (OpenWeatherMap API). To get a list of parks located in a particular state, say the state name.

We are using more than one Alexa skill to exchange information with each other through different Alexa devices, as one skill is available for a client to submit his request(s) with all features required to the service provider, on other hand another skill will be used by a service provider to scan all requests from different clients and be able to answer each request, then client will use his skill to check for feedback on his request(s).

But that’s not all…

Hackster is committed to producing more skills for Amazon than anyone else on Earth, and so, the first 50 people to publish skills even received a $100 gift card! Submissions included everything from ways to prepare for job interviews to post and read messages on Slack to use an Amazon Echo and IFTTT in the UK. Be sure to check them all out here.

Congrats again to everyone involved, especially 16-year-old developer Austin Wilson who turned Alexa into a Star Trek-like space ship interface and the other five winners who will be taking home a trophy, some Amazon gadgets, and $$$!