Project 3: Build a Podcast Player

Welcome to our third project-based course about voice app development. In previous courses, we already learned some of the basics of building Alexa Skills and Google Actions. After an initial setup in Project 1: Hello World, we looked at some more advanced routing in Project 2: Adventure Game.

For project 3, we'll look into one of the most popular use cases for voice apps and smart speakers: streaming audio. Let's build a podcast player voice app that works on both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

You can find the full code example of the Podcast Player Voice App on GitHub.

• What We're Building
• Course Outline
• Let's Get Started

What We're Building

In this course we're going to build an easily modifiable podcast player Alexa Skill and Google Action.

It will automatically play multiple episodes in a row, let the user pause and resume whenever they want, and let them switch between episodes freely.

While building that, we will learn about

• the Alexa AudioPlayer and Google MediaResponse interfaces to stream audio files,
• how to incorporate platform specific features into your multi-platform app,
• how to structure bigger projects,
• the Jovo Language Model,

and much more. See all the steps below.

Course Outline

You can find the full code example of the Podcast Player Voice App on GitHub.

• Step 1: Streaming an Audio File
• Step 2: Streaming Multiple Files in a Row
• Step 3: Preparing our Development Environment
• Step 4: Pause and Resume the Audio Stream
• Step 5: Store and Retrieve Multiple Episodes
• Step 6: Manually Switch between Episodes
• Step 7: Rework the User Interaction at Launch
• Step 8: The Final Steps

Let's Get Started

We start by playing a single audio file for both Alexa and Google Assistant with.

Step 1: Streaming an Audio File.

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash