Beautiful Soup Spill ft Alexa

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project came from the thousands of times that random thoughts and questions related to UTDallas run through your head, and you'd like to know the answer, but not enough that you're willing to search for it. It also came from the questions you've asked time and time again, but want to easily double check and verify the answer. Furthermore, we as a team wanted to learn more about Alexa and develop our own unique Alexa skill.

What it does

The project is an Alexa skill with that has multiple intents/functionalities related to finding and retrieving information about UTDallas. It searches for information by webscraping the UTDallas webpages in order to find an answer to questions from the users. It was intended to be able to rescrape the webpages when it saw that information had changed so that it would always remain up-to-date.

How we built it

We made some Amazon accounts and eventually developed a skill that could be called. We then worked on trying to make a Python script

Challenges we ran into

First off, our project didn't even meet it's primary goal, so finishing that would be our next step in our free time. Then, in the short term, there's two ideal areas of focus for developing this project further for UTD: Being able to answer questions about UTDallas's sports teams, and answer the open hours for on-campus businesses, especially restaurants. For larger, longer projects, we could make Alexa respond to questions about the clubs here at UTDallas and set up the Alexa intents to be interpreted by Alexa without the user giving the exact commands.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got the Alexa skill to respond to unique commands on a physical device. We also got a working Python script that could copy all of the HTML from a page, but didn't get to the sorting. We considered both of these to be pretty big accomplishments, since we had never had any experience with Alexa and very little experience with Python.

What we learned

We all learned quite a lot during this hackathon, especially to always go through the vegan food line. Also, it turns out that UTDallas' webpages are full of errors, and seemingly identical Python code can run on Mac but fail on Windows. We learned everything we know about programming Alexa skills, and some Python code. But the most useful knowledge that we picked up all came from our neighboring group, who was willing to share their vast amount of experience to help us with not only our project struggles, but also to give us Hackathon and general college/career advice.

What's next for Beautiful Soup Spill ft Alexa

First off, our project didn't even meet it's primary goal, so finishing that would be our next step in our free time. Then, in the short term, there's two ideal areas of focus for developing this project further for UTD: Being able to answer questions about UTDallas's sports teams, and answer the open hours for on-campus businesses, especially restaurants. For larger, longer projects, we could make Alexa respond to questions about the clubs here at UTDallas and set up the Alexa intents to be interpreted by Alexa without the user giving the exact commands.

Built With

• alexa-skills
• python