AVA - Automated Voice Assistant

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  Presentation Slides from video demo

Inspiration Shreeya works as a digital accessibility assistant in the University Technology office where she makes documents and media in the Computer Science department accessible to everyone, including the differently abled, in the college. This where she got the inspiration to work on a project for the visually impaired. While discussing the idea with team members, Gautam had the idea of making something that helps them in basic activities - such as booking a doctor's appointment. The combination of these two ideas steered our project.

What it does The software books a doctor's appointment for the individual by using speech recognition that inputs the required details(name, date of birth etc.) into the website in which the appointment is to be made.

How we built it We created a web scraper that scrapes through a dental website which goes through every page and stores the fields that are to be entered to make an appointment. Then, the program asks uses text to speech to ask the user for audio input and the answers are entered into the input boxes to book an appointment.

Challenges we ran into The challenges we ran into included learning how to go from one page to the other after submitting the initial set of details. Moreover, we had to learn to click buttons on the website using python.

Accomplishments that we're proud of We successfully built a web scraper used on a relatively complicated website which will serve as a skeleton which would be used to scrape other websites.

What we learned as a group of first time hackers, we gained insight into web scraping and how to work with speech recognition open source libraries. Additionally, we were able to research more and understand more about the features that one can incorporate into softwares to make them more accessible for the differently abled, a group which is usually neglected inspite of such a fast paced development in the field of technology.

What's next for AVA - Automated Voice Assistant We want to make our software compatible with other appointments to make doctors' appointments and other kinds of appointments. Moreover, we plan on integrating our software with smart assistants such as Alexa and Siri, and make it available in more languages to ensure greater accessibility and usability. While our main focus is to make our program more accessible to the differently abled, it can also be used by anyone who wants to automate the process of appointment bookings. Especially now, when we move to an era of smart homes and smart devices, a program such as ours is a step towards this and a step towards accessible tech.

Built With

• beautiful-soup
• python
• requests
• selenium
• speechrecognition