Kristofer Box Undergraduate Dissertation 2017/18

Football Flair: Build an Alexa 'Skill' for Amazon Echo

Supervised by R.K.Moore

Abstract

Smart Speakers are a new technology phenomenon with each having a unique virtual assistant. With companies selling millions of devices in recent years, developers have worked collectively to create tens of thousands of applications for consumers to use. Football applications are however still scarce; current options provide limited choices for leagues with little to no depth, or simply repeat betting tips provided by human experts.

This project aims to fill this void on smart speaker hubs, allowing users to get up-to-date football statistics for their favourite leagues and teams, and also get automated respectable predictions for upcoming fixtures, all in one easy-to-use application.

The following report provides the full story of this application; from early literature reviews, requirements building, designing, implementing, and evaluating the performance.

With the close of the project, the application was published on the Amazon Skills Store on the 27th April 2018, with an accompanying website available at www.footballflair.co.uk. With over 40 sessions in the first three days, the success of this project has already been translated into user acceptance on their Amazon Echos.