Project Description

This Project contains a skill for Amazon Alexa, that can be used to query the menu of the university canteen of HS Mittweida (Mensa).

Capabilities

The skill is capable of answering questions regarding:

• the menu of a specific day within the next 14 days
• the dishes offered in a specific category within the next 14 days

It is currently working for requests in german only, but could easily be extended to support other languages as well.

Examples

To get the menu (that means all dishes of all categories) of a specific day, say for example:

• Was finde ich Mittwoch in der Mensa?
• Sag mir, was es am Donnerstag gibt.
• Wie sieht das Angebot am Mittwoch aus?
• Freitag essen.
• Montag Gerichte.
• Was gibt es am Dienstag?

To get the dishes offered in a specific category on a specific day, say for example:

• Was gibt es bei Campusteller am Mittwoch?
• Was kann ich am Montag in der Kategorie Pfanne und Grill essen?
• Was gibt es Freitag bei MensaInternational?
• Montag Vegetarisch
• Vegetarisch Montag

Project Structure

Sources

• base_builder.py is the main entry point for the skill. This is where the request handlers are registered.
• context.py contains the Context class, which holds the language as well as the representation of the current menu for the next 14 days.
• custom_handler.py contains DayIntentHandler and DayAndCategoryIntentHandler, to which the user requests are delegated
• speech_output.py contains logic to build an answer to the request by concatenating the phrases from template.py.
• template.py contains the phrases that are used to build the answers.
• xml_parser.py parses the menu, that is retrieved from the API, into a list of dish objects.
• utterances contains the exported utterances (the phrases used to invoke the handler) as csv. They can be imported into alexa console to be build the communication model.

Utilities

On first setup, create a Python 3.9 virtual environment and install the dependencies from requirements.txt. Also on first setup, execute the setup_packaging.sh script to create a directory that contains the sources of the dependencies, which the skill needs when deployd on AWS lambda. AWS lambda expects the skill to be uploaded as a zip archive containing the source files and all dependencies.

Executing make package will create a skill.zip, that can be deployed on AWS lambda. It will include all current project files in from the handler directory as well as the dependencies from the dependencies directory.