BabyAngel - Make baby sitter appointments through Echo

Inspiration

Scheduling and booking babysitters is a chore! Like most parents, I am very particular about who I allow in my home to babysit. I have a list of trusted babysitters who I call upon for babysitting. Unfortunately, it usually consists of calling multiple baby sitters, waiting and waiting for call backs. I really would love to be able to say "Alexa, I need a babysitter for Friday from 7pm to 11pm" and have Alexa take care of the tedious work of making the arrangements.

What it does

We want to built a platform (proof on concept) which allows us to easily make baby sitting appointments using Amazon Alexa enabled devices (Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show etc). No need to separately contact multiple baby sitters and struggle to work out their availability. Just tell Alexa the date and time and the system will broadcast the request to your preferred baby sitters and also allow them to confirm and record their availability

How we built it

We built an Alexa skill using Node.js called BabyAngel skill. This serves as the primary medium for user interaction.

Users also makes a one time entry of a list of their preferred baby sitters via a web form (php, webservices, DynamoDB). Whenever user requests baby sitters, the skill sends out a broadcast communication via to all these baby sitters. The communication medium used is SMS using PubNub's SMS API.

Moreover in order to record responses from baby sitters a short URL to a webpage is sent along in the SMS. Sitters can visit this page to confirm their availability for the requested timeslot and their responses are saved in the database so that user can also inquire about the status of his/her request (via Alexa)