Earthquake Info Skill

Earthquake Info reports the magnitude and location of several recent earthquakes near a particular city.

Features

This is an Amazon Echo skill using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) SDK, and can be easily deployed to AWS Lambda. The service does not report earthquakes with a magnitude less than 3.0, or earthquakes over X days.

Example Calls Using the Echo

Here are some sample conversations that you can have with Alexa.

Example 1

Alexa, start Earthquake Info.
Near what city do you want to search for earthquakes?
Wichita, Kansas
Two earthquakes near Wichita. A magnitude 3.1 near Anthony. A magnitude 3.7 near Medford.

Example 2

Alexa, ask Earthquake Info about Palm Springs.
One earthquake near Palm Springs. A magnitude 4.01 near Big Bear Lake.

Example 3

Alexa, ask Earthquake Info about San Francisco, California.
No earthquakes near San Francisco in the last 14 days.

Technologies Used

• AWS Lambda. I deploy the source on Lambda because it's very low cost (1M calls per month free), scales easily, and configuration is simple.
• Google Maps Geocoding API. This is used to convert a city location into coordinates.
  • NOTE: An API Key is required to use this service.
• USGS Earthquake Catalog API. The USGS API tells us the earthquakes in a certain location and we can filter the results by using optional arguments in the API call.