Alice In Onesie-land presents: Alexa Find My Course
Inspiration
Registering for classes at Georgia Tech has never been a painless process. The tools that are currently available for course lookups and schedule generations are simple at best and nonexistent at worse. This utility provides a convenient, intuitive solution to this problem by allowing students to access course and scheduling information with the ease of a simple query.
What it does
Find My Course is a simple Alexa skill where users can query their Alexa-enabled device for information regarding a specific Georgia Tech course. The skill will then return essential information regarding course registration, including lecture times, locations, professors, and Course Registration Numbers (CRNs).
How we built it
The backend for this project includes a web-scraping tool to parse information from the Georgia Tech Course Catalog. This information is stored within the tool in the form of .csv files for each course school and term. This system could be easily replaced with an AWS hosted database, however that is outside the scope of this initial exploratory project.
Challenges we ran into
None of the members in our group had any prior experience working with Amazon Web Services and Alexa Skills. As expected when developing in a completely new framework, we encountered significant challenges configuring and deploying the skill. A tragically large portion of this weekend was spent debugging configuration and settings, however we are happy with the amount we were able to accomplish and the product we created.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This entire project is something that we are proud of. We were able to explore outside our comfort zone to learn a new framework and develop a useful utility in the span of only two days. The utility of this skill is apparent to anyone familiar with the current state of Georgia Tech course registration, and the usefulness of this skill, even in it's infant state, is something that we are quite proud of.
What we learned
This project taught each of us a good deal about the process and procedures for setting up an Alexa skill, as well as using Amazon Web Services to perform cloud-based calculations and data lookups in order to provide a versatile, effective utility for students.
What's next for Alexa Find My Course
Expanding this platform to include a more formalized AWS-hosted database would allow the amount of data stored to exceed what is feasible with the current backend for the application. This would enable the project to expand to include registration for a multitude of other local schools, exponentially increasing the potential user-base for this skill. Other future developments will include the polishing and expanding of the user interface through additional Intents and Utterances, as well as a more conversational interface than the current prototype.
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