Inspiration
It would be nice if virtual assistants are able to create bank accounts just by asking. No more visiting the bank or even have to make a call. Now you can create bank accounts right from the comfort of your house. This application currently supports Capital One Bank accounts.
What it does
We created an Alexa skill that helps the user to create bank accounts. The users speak with alexa and has a conversation where they provide some details to open a bank account, just like visiting a bank branch. At the end of the conversation, the virtual assistant tells the user whether the account was approved with the new account details.
How we built it
We used Captial One developer exchange API and alexa skill kit. We deployed a NodeJS based middleware the facilitates the converstion with Alexa and the bank API. Currently, the application works in amazon AWS on a serverless achitecture. This kind of achitecture is perfect for alexa based skills since they do not require us to spin up a server everytime a new account creation request arrives.
Challenges we ran into
Building a fluid conversational skill in alexa was difficult. We wanted the flow of creating an account to be as natural as possible. We also had some trouble with deploying the middleware and getting it to communicate with the API.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to achieve all the goals of the project.
What we learned
A lot, from alexa skill kit to how APIs work to using AWS lamdas.
What's next for Banking with Alexa
We would like to move to a complete serverless architecture with more robust user expereince and quiker account creation times.
Built With
- amazon-alexa
- amazon-web-services
- capital-one-developer-exchange-api
- javascript
- node.js
- serverless-architecture
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