Best Roomies

Make shared expenses easy fun and fair

Comment

Inspiration

They never put the toilet seat up, blast weird music in weird hours, and always finish your last yogurt. These issues will wait for the next hackathon. This time, I looked into how roommate manage shared expenses. Most roommates don't remember what and how much they paid for, and keeping track of everything gets tricky. There are apps to solve this, but it's complicated and as time passes, nobody really bothers to take out their phone, open the app and type the details just to save a few bucks. It's just too much work. Using a voice command is much easier, it's hands free and casual, and Alexa is usually placed in a convenient common space where everyone can access it on the go. It's the perfect solution for this problem!

What it does

Best Roomies can save all the roommates payments and their descriptions. Then, each of the roommates can ask Alexa for their individual or the entire household's monthly summary.
If a more detailed report is wanted, any roommate can ask Alexa to email them a monthly report. The report contains the dates, times, names, amount and description of all the payments for the requested month.

How I built it

I used AWS lambda with node.js. The data is kept in Amazon DynamoDB.

Challenges I ran into

I needed different users in the same household to have a single identifier. I managed to create a 'add roommate'/'join household' mechanism to enable users join their roommates household quickly and easily only by voice. Other then that, nobody really likes to talk and maintain payments. Best Roomies motivates users to use it by glorifying top payers, replying in funny phrases and more .

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Several friends of mine tested the skill for about 2 weeks, they said it's a real life changer when it comes to managing shared expenses. I really hope it can really help roommates and students get their expenses shared fairly!

What I learned

Everything in this project was new to me. I've never written a 'word' in JS and in node.js, neither used Amazon Lambda or DynamoDB. I read a lot about different use cases for voice skills, what I should do and what I should avoid. The tools I used are fantastic and they are really easy to learn and use. I would definitely use them in the future for other projects.

What's next for Best Roomies

So much more! Support voice purchases, this way the payments will be added automatically with no extra work! Support chores and messages among roommates, displaying the payments report on echo show and spot. Make the skill a one stop shop for every shared household!

Share this project:

Updates