Amazon Alexa Skill

Speak with the YMCA through your voice assistant

Project Services:

YMCA members are increasingly relying on mobile devices, voice assistants, and new channels of content delivery. YMCA associations need to stay ahead of the curve to ensure that they meet the needs of their members.

Smart Speakers Market Growth

According to the latest forecasts, the number of US smart speaker users rise at a compound annual growth rate of 30-40%. Smart speakers are essential because they represent a new interactive digital endpoint in the home.

Voice assistants will continue to have more massive total user bases on in homes, smartphones, and cars. Smart speaker owners are employing a wider variety of voice use cases and showing a higher frequency of use than the other devices. It means that voice assistants in smart speakers are more likely to have become a daily habit and are expanding consumer expectations around voice interactive experiences.

Five Jars performs digital transformation for many YMCAs, and we've decided to create a proof of concept of Amazon Alexa's skill to show technology potential.

U.S. Adult Smart Speaker Installed Base January 2020

Source: Voicebot.ai

Amazon Alexa Skill for YMCA

We selected Amazon Alexa for the ease of development of new skills on the platform. Amazon Alexa provides an excellent framework for building and deploying applications to the store.

Five Jars created an Amazon Alexa skill that allows users to interact with YMCA content through conversational, natural language, and shows off a variety of new features.

The Amazon Alexa skill for YMCA uses the Open Y website as a source of data via REST API. The Program Event Framework provides all the needed details about the schedules and program registration.

Future of Smart Speakers

The smart speakers market is growing fast, and they have the potential to grow and develop even further in the future. With that, we can enrich smart speakers with a more personalized experience, integration on transaction level to build personal schedule, book personal training, or register kids to a summer camp.

Built proof of concept of Amazon Alexa skill for YMCAs

Discovered a new channel for content distribution

Found a new interface for transactional activities

Created a vision of smart speakers usage for YMCAs

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