Gene Teller: an extensible Alexa Skill for gene-relevant databases

SUMMARY: Voice assistants have become increasingly embedded in consumer electronics, as the quality of their interaction improves and the cost of hardware continues to drop. Despite their ubiquity, these assistants remain underutilized as a means of accessing biological research data. Gene Teller is a voice assistant service based on the Alexa Skills Kit and Amazon Lambda functions that enables scientists to query for gene-centric information in an intuitive manner. It includes several features, such as synonym disambiguation and short-term memory, that enable a natural conversational interaction, and is extensible to include new resources. The underlying architecture, based on Simple Storage Service and Amazon Web Services Lambda, is cost efficient and scalable. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: A publicly accessible version of Gene Teller is available as an Alexa Skill from the Amazon Marketplace at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BRD8SS8. The source code is freely available on GitHub at https://github.com/solinvicta/geneTeller.