That sounds fantastic. We got my grandfather an Echo for the same reason. How can I get a hold of that skill for him?
That said, that's enough of a kick for me to actually clean it up and publish some stuff. I'll email you when I throw pieces of it online (in the next day or two). At the very least, I wasn't able to find a lib that performs all the steps Amazon asks of you to validate the request so I wrote a utility library and hapi auth plugin for that. I'll release those.
Made a quick demonstration video: https://youtu.be/TkVnhp4F1xk