Amazon has teamed up with ChooseCo, publishers of the classic Choose Your Own Adventure series of books, to bring their guided adventure stories to Alexa devices. A new Choose Your Own Adventure Alexa Skill has been released using Amazon’s Audible brand. The skill currently offers two different books that are both free.
The two books offered are “The Abominable Snowman,” which has you search for a yeti in the Himalayas, and “Journey Under the Sea,” which takes you to the underwater world of Atlantis. The Alexa version of these stories have 28 and 37 total endings, respectively. Since these are being presented by Audible, each story is professionally narrated with voice actors.
To launch into the adventure, simply say “Alexa, open Choose Your Own Adventure.” Since this is a children’s skill, you’ll need to provide permission through the Alexa app if this is the first children’s skill you’ve ever used. Once you select one of the two stories, you’ll be asked to make decisions to guide the adventure. You can say “go back” to return to the previous scene if you don’t like the decision you made, or you can say “start over” or “change story” to begin from the start.
@AFTVnews
AFTVnews
I played around with this yesterday. It’s not too bad.
It has an actual narrator and sound effects to try to make the wooden writing more immersive. There’s a notable delay between the book portion and the alexa portion asking what you would like to do.
A good thing is when you hit a dead end, it will ask you if you’d like to go back and choose the other choice instead of forcing you to go through the beginning again. Although it doesn’t seem like there’s any way to skip forward if you exit the skill.
This is a thing that could keep a kid busy for a bit but I can’t imagine it’s a thing they would return to often like an actual book.