Football Argentina Alexa Skill

(c) Pablo Giudice 2018

This will teach Alexa about the most recent scores of Argentine soccer first division.

I made this because I wanted to know how my team was doing in the league, and Alexa wasn't helping me much. This can be extended to different leagues and tournaments.

This is a serverless application, meaning there isn't a server always running the program. This is based on Amazon Lambda, DynamoDB, and the Amazon Alexa API Gateway.

It has two parts:

• the front-end (alexa configuration + lambda function)
• the back-end (writes to a dynamodb database the values of last weeks positions)

Features

• Alexa can remember your team preferences. Just ask 'when is my team playing' and she will answer.
• You can ask 'When is X playing Y'.
• You can ask for the current standings

For a detailed description go to the file alexa/alexa_code for a configuration file.

Building

Use NPM

npm install

Setting up the alexa Skill.

Follow the sample tutorial. Create two intents: GetPositionsIntent GetStrikers

Copy content of the file alexa/alexa_code.txt and paste it in the Code Editor view in the Alexa skill builder application.

Setting up Lambda

In AWS create a function called alexaFootballArgentina. Upload the code inside the lambda directory. Add alexa skills as a trigger.

Setting up the database

We need three databases:

• fa_positions
  • key: date
• fa_latest_update
  • update_id: [fa_positions, fa_strikers]
• fa_strikers
  • key: date

Run the scripts create_X to create each of them.

Setting up the backend

The backend is also a lambda function that scrapes the remote website.

It runs using cron: From Saturday to Monday at 3am (UTC time)

3 3 ? * FRI-MON *