Anxiety Bot - Let a robot take care of them for you

Paul Ford's AnxietyBox attempts to use technology to help you realize and overcome your anxieties in a fun a unique way. Anxiety Bot explores his concept by using Alexa to make the interaction conversational.

Technical Solution

The skill itself comprises of one Lambda and four primary custom intents. DynamoDB is used to persist the user's phone number and help verify their phone number.

SDKs

• Amazon Alexa Skills Kit SDK

• Twilio SDK

• Logless from Bespoken Tools

Voice User Experience (VUI)

The VUI is very important when you are interacting with a user that might already not be having a great day, thus it was important to make it as simple as possible for a user to vent their anxieties to the Anxiety Bot. The first time you launch the skill you will go through an on-boarding process to verify the user's phone number. This only needs to be completed once and after the user can just tell Alexa their anxiety in one command:

"Alexa, tell Anxiety Bot I am worried about my presentation this afternoon."

Phone Number Verification

In order to text the user their anxiety, they first need to verify their phone number. This involves first telling Anxiety Bot their phone number, receiving a two word code, and then telling Anxiety Bot the code.

Remaining Tasks and Next Steps

• Texting the anxiety back to the user at a time in the future using a lambda function

• More robustness in recognizing the anxiety

• Smarter Random Scheduling, if they include a time the message should be before the mentioned time

• Happier adjectives and nouns for the verification codes

• Privacy Policy

• Submit Skill

For more information on AnxietyBox, check out the website and listen to the Reply All Podcast interview with Paul Ford.