Loksabha Election Archive

Query India's General Election results with ease using Alexa

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Inspiration

The next General Elections of India (Loksabha Election) are near and people love to discuss politics. Many a times it happens that one needs to lookup some information during those discussions which requires us to make a guess or use an Internet search. The Election Commission of India provides the historical data in spreadsheet and portable document format which runs into hundreds of pages. The idea is to query the election result by using a simple voice user interface rather than using Advance Filter option of the spreadsheet program.

What it does

Present the election result using an easy voice user interface in both audio and visual form depending on the device capabilities.

How I built it

I built the skill using Alexa ASK CLI on NodeJS with MySQL database AWS RDS.

Challenges I ran into

The major challenge was cleaning the data and transforming it into a useable format. The data provided on the website of Election Commission of India is .XLS and .PDF format. The data is not consistent, for example state name sometimes use abbreviations, contains extra spaces etc. I used MySQL as the backend as I also intend to add a lot more queries involving aggregation and statistics in future.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The fact that I can make AIexa do something which I want it to do, that it cannot do out of the box and with any existing skill is the real accomplishment.

What I learned

I learnered that voice user interface may appear simple while using but designing them requires a lot of thought process.

What's next for Alexa Skill Loksabha Election Archive

I want to add a lot more query type like finding the candidates on the bases of age, statistics based on user supplied parameters. Graphs and pie charts on devices with display.

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