QBurstian Bags Amazon Alexa Skills Contest Prize
Mohamed Nisar from QBurst has won the Amazon Alexa Skills Contest. His entry bagged the third place in the contest that had participants from all over the world.
The contestants had to design, develop, and submit a new skill for Alexa, the cloud-based Amazon service that powers voice-based interactions with devices. Fitness Logger, Nisar’s prize-winning submission, is an Alexa skill that enables users to store and keep track of their daily workouts via voice commands.
Fitness Logger can save the number of repetitions, sets, and weights used in each workout. It can fetch the data for each exercise by date and pull up the best performance till date. Using Fitness Logger is as easy as saying, “Alexa, ask Fitness Logger to add ten pull downs with twenty pounds” or “Alexa, ask Fitness Logger what’s my best for push ups.” Nisar’s Fitness Logger leverages multiple Amazon technologies: Amazon Echo on the hardware side and Amazon Alexa, AWS Lambda, and AWS RDS on the software side.
Mohamed Nisar, the contest winner.
For Nisar, who won an Amazon Fire TV as the prize, the contest was as exciting as it was challenging. “The toughest part was to come up with a voice interface model that would work for all the features. I’m glad the judges found my idea useful. I’m super excited about owning a cool new Amazon gadget!”
The Amazon Alexa Skills Contest, held in partnership with Amazon Alexa, had 178 global participants and 80 projects competing for the top prizes. The contest was open from May 9, 2017 to June 30, 2017. The winners were announced on July 7, 2017.