bank-of-alexa

Inspiration

We saw what you could do with Alexa and seeing the talk by Capital One made it obvious to us. We wanted to see the future and the only way to do that is by inventing it.

What it does

We built a skill for Alexa using Python as our backend and flask-ask to interact with and create the skill for Alexa. You can call commands such as "Alexa, show me my balance in Retirement", "Alexa ask banking to show me my financial report", "Alexa ask banking to remind me that I owe John £10", and "Alexa ask banking to buy me a chicken using account Credit Card"

How we built it

We built this over a 24 hour hackathon using Flask-ask, Python, Json and Requests. Arron and I worked on the backend side using the Capital One API. Ollie and Chris worked on the Alexa front end.

Challenges we ran into

The Alexa API regularly timed out due to poor wifi or other issues. To overcome this we set up a mobile hotspot to circumnavigate the bad internet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making Alexa understand and respond to requests made by humans. This was one of the more challenging aspects, despite the Alexa API supporting this. Because of the issues we had with the API it was difficult for us to develop a basic working Alexa application fast.

What we learned

We learned how to use object orientated design within Python and how to effectively work with the Alexa and Capital One API.

What's next for bank-of-alexa

Since Capital One only have a hackathon API we might not be able to develop much on it, however, the future of banking is clearly to bring it into the home and to use IOT devices such as Amazon Echo/Dot and we are glad to have been at the edge of technology.

Update

Thanks to some good comments from Capital One, we will be continuing this project.

Built With

Submitted to

HackNotts 2016

Created by

I worked on the backend with Arron, I created functions which acted like API following the Unix Philosophy to allow the Alexa team to easily implement the capital one functions in their programs. Specifically I created:
How much you owe someone and the ability to owe someone an amount

Ability to find a users account using natural language processing which allowed the user to search for "savings account", "ID: 5f9568fmae", "account with balance £500" or any other parameters that are unique to the account.

Ability to purchase products from sellers that support capital one

Create a financial report

Brandon Skerritt
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/brandonls
Worked with Brandon on processing the nessie API and making the endpoints for Alexa.

Specifically on the OOP aspect of the system. Making the Bills, Account, and Transfers Classes. Parsing multiple accounts from Nessie, and converting that into a list of objects making it easier for both the backend and front end to work multiple pieces of data.

Aaron Osher
Actually set up the Alexa. Very proud of it. aMEIzing.

Christos Ballas

Updates

Brandon Skerritt started this project — Nov 27, 2016 06:59 AM EST

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