Alexa Powered RubberDuck

Inspiration

As programmers , we know the frustration of being stuck with an issue/bug that persists. Rubber duck debugging is a debugging method where the user 'talks' to an inanimate object (in this case a rubber duck) and walks it through the issue/bug he or she is facing and then hitting upon the solution in the process of explaining the problem itself. We wanted to extend this idea to make the rubber duck return helpful responses which would help the user either solve the problem or remodel/modiify his/her thought process.

What it does

The Rubberduck ios application records users 'walkthrough' or 'bug/issue description' via the microphone and queries Amazon Alexa using AVS - Amazon voice service. A Custom alexa skill searches stackoverflow for threads/topics matching the description in the audio recorded by the user. Alexa reads the results it searched to the user who can decide if the response is helpful and and choose to repeat the process with a different thought.

How we built it

The application was built using ios , Amazon-voice-service API , alexa-sdk , Nodejs , amazon-lambda.

Challenges we ran into

The rubber duck debugging principle is supposed to allow the user to walk the 'rubber duck' through the issue / bug in a free flowing manner. It was a challenge to extract technical jargons related to the user-issue and convert them into standard utterances that can invoke the intent which triggers the stackoverflow search. The search results can still be a little inconsistent but we managed to achieve satisfactory results.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First hackathon experience for one team-mate! We are also proud of the fact that without having any prior knowledge of Alexa - SDK , We were successfully able to setup , code and send a voice query and invoke a voice response that is related to the user's issue/bug .

What we learned

We picked a lot of new skills and gained a good understanding of how Amazon Alexa skill can be created , its imitations and strengths.

What's next for Alexa Powered RubberDuck

There is scope to add a custom NLP Algorithm to improve the specificity of the Alexa response.

Built With

• alexa-sdk
• amazon-alexa
• amazon-lambda
• amazon-voice-service-api
• ios
• node.js