National Park Service

Vision

The National Park Service will communicate NPS alerts, events, and news as well as additional authoritative information about parks, campgrounds, and visitor centers via AI Personal Assistants in order to better serve our visitors.

Sample questions that digital assistants could answer using existing data include:

• What National Park Service sites are in [state]?
• Are there any active alerts at [park]?
• What events are happening today at [park]?
• Are there campgrounds at [park]?
• Does [campground] accept 40' long RVs?
• What are the hours for [visitor center] at [park]?

Resources

The NPS has an API and documentation live and accessible at https://www.nps.gov/subjects/developer/index.htm.

API resources include:

• Alerts - Alerts communicate information about hazardous, potentially hazardous, or changing conditions that may affect a visit to a national park. Alert data includes the type of alert, title, description, and optional link to additional information.
• Campgrounds - Campground data includes location, contact, operating hours, site amenities, fee, and accessibility information for campgrounds in national parks. At least one representative photo of each campground is available Some parks have multiple campgrounds of a variety of types (eg, developed or primitive); others have none.
• Events - Event data includes information about the date, time, fee, and description of events taking place in national parks.
• News Releases - News release data includes a title, abstract, and link to national park news releases, as well as an optional image.
• Parks - Park basics data includes location, contact, operating hours, and entrance fee/pass information for each national park. At least five photos of each park are also available.
• Visitor Centers - Visitor center data includes location, contact, and operating hours information for visitor centers and other visitor contact facilities in national parks At least one visitor center is listed for each park; some parks with multiple visitor centers may include information about more than one.

Platforms

The National Park Service is sincerely interested in making its data available through all of the platforms currently a part of this pilot project (including, but not limited to, Amazon Alexa, Facebook Messenger, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana). For this reason, the possibility of a middleware solution that might act as an abstraction layer between our data and these services is most interesting. However, as a first foray into this field, the NPS team has decided to develop a couple of products for the Amazon Alexa platform.

Products

Amazon's Alexa currently allows for custom skills, smart home skills, flash briefing skills, and video skills. The NPS team developed several flash briefings as well as a custom skill for the purposes of this GSA pilot project.

NPS Ranger Custom Skill

The NPS Ranger Alexa skill uses NPS API data to allow a user to ask for a variety of information about national parks including:

• Alerts for any National Park Service site
• Contact information for any National Park Service site
• Description of any National Park Service site
• Directions to any National Park Service site
• Events for any National Park Service site
• News for any National Park Service site
• Trivia for any National Park Service site
• Random NPS trivia
• List of National Park Service sites in any U.S. state

Sample code for this custom skill is available. Python code resides in this nps-alexa-skill repo. ColdFusion code available in this NPS-Digital-Assistant-CF repo.

An MP3 recording demonstrating the NPS Ranger custom skill is available.

Flash Briefing

Working code has been developed that calls the National Park Service (NPS) API, consumes data for a park, and outputs that data in JSON that is properly formatted for use by a variety of Alexa flash briefings. Examples include:

• NPS News - Flash briefing in which the five newest news items from across all sites of the National Park Service are pulled from the NPS API.
• Park Alert - Flash briefing in which all active alerts for a specific national park site are returned. The same code works for all NPS sites as parks are selected by passing in a single URL variable (e.g., ?park=acad).
• Park News (last five) - Flash briefing in which the five most recent news releases for a specific national park site are returned. The same code works for all NPS sites as parks are selected by passing in a single URL variable (e.g., ?park=acad).
• Park News (last month) - Flash briefing in which all news releases no more than four weeks old are returned for a specific national park site. The same code works for all NPS sites as parks are selected by passing in a single URL variable (e.g., ?park=acad).

Sample code for these flash briefings is available. PHP code resides in the nps-flash-briefings repo. ColdFusion code available upon request.

Team

• Ken Handwerger (ken_handwerger@nps.gov)
• Matt Poyner (matt_poyner@nps.gov)
• Mike Tangorre (michael_tangorre@contractor.nps.gov)
• Stephen Condon (stephen_condon@contractor.nps.gov)
• Todd M. Edgar (todd_edgar@nps.gov)
• Trevor Cole (trevor_cole@nps.gov)