In this episode, Teri welcomes Mark Tucker, an Alexa Champion, Bixby Premier Developer, the current Senior Architect of Voice Technology at Soar.com, and the creator of the revolutionary Alexa game, Number Spies.
Welcome, Mark!
Mark Tucker is a software developer and architect with over 25 years’ experience. He started his voice-tech journey in 2016 when there were only 4,000 skills in the Alexa Skills Store, and has worked at 2 startups creating innovative voice experiences for customers. Mark finds time to create his own Alexa Skills and Bixby Capsules, and is the organizer of the Phoenix Alexa Meetup and the Phoenix Chapter of the Ubiquitous Voice Society.
He has spoken at conferences including the Phoenix Mobile and Emerging Tech Expo, The Alexa Conference, Voice Summit, and Project Voice. Mark is the creator of Speech Markdown which he released as open source and can be found at SpeechMarkDown.org. He enjoys finding ways for non-profits to benefit from voice-first. He has a passion for family, voice technology and serving others.
Getting Into Voice
- His first run in with voice technology when was he was a teenager. He had just received his first home computer and it had a voice synthesis module which could say about 80 words or phrases. He found that very cool.
- He learned how to do programming on that computer and later in high school advanced his programming knowledge.
- He has been involved in technology ever since and most of his skills are self-taught.
- He came across Alexa in 2016 when there were about 3,000 skills in the US Skills store. He started by mastering all sorts of things from Amazon Web Services to all their cloud services.
- When he got into Alexa development, he fell in love with the conversational nature of the technology and the fun experiences that one can build with it.
- Number Spies is the most ambitious project that he’s ever done and it had been an idea in his head for more than a year.
The Idea For Number Spies and How it Works
- He came across the concept of a number station, which spies used to communicate during the Cold War and World War 2, and he was fascinated by it.
- One spy would use a short wave radio to transmit a series of digits and the other spy tuned to that frequency would be able to hear the digits, but they couldn’t decode the message unless they had the one-time pad that was similar to the one the sender had. That made the message an unbreakable cypher.
- Mark learned more about that and he used some features of that concept in creating Number Spies. For example, the game produces poly-generated numbers that sound like it’s a real radio transmission. He had to mix down files together on the back end and he now has a content management system where he has can put in a message and it will encode it. The system then builds a file that can be listened to through a flash briefing.
- One can then go to a website and enter the numbers they have heard, and that can help them figure out what the secret was if they have the corresponding one-time pad.
- One can choose to manually decode a message or ask Alexa to help make the process faster.
- When one manually decodes the message they get more points.
Playing the Game
- The player takes on the role of a spy, Agent 313, who is brand new to the agency.
- The game gives the new player a walk through as part of their initial briefing after which they will be sent to spy school so they can understand the main commands they will need to use to play the game. After that, the player can start the game.
- The player can also go to the website where all the commands are listed.
- They can play at least two or three times a week decoding messages and solving puzzles.
- Inside the messages that the player has to decode, they can be told to visit a country or city, and travelling there can earn them points.
- Everything that happens in the game is tied to a certain day so the player has to play, decode the message, and complete their mission within 24 hours.
- The game also has levels and as the player moves up the levels, the missions they go on become harder and more complex.
- The player can go into a different mission every 90 minutes from when they successfully complete another one.
- There is in-skill purchasing that the player can do. For example, they need money to travel to their different locations depending on where they travel.
- The agency that one belongs to is based out of Washington, D.C. and so the farther one travels the costlier it is. The more missions one completes, the more money they get.
- When they run out of money, they can purchase more money.
- One has to use an alias when they’re travelling and so at the beginning of the game, the game creates an auto-alias for the player and then as they play the game they can create other aliases for themselves.
- The goal of playing the game is to become a master spy.
- There are many fun and entertaining aspects of the game that make it so awesome to play.
List of resources mentioned in this episode
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