BMCC Hub

This is an Alexa Skill made for BMCC Students

Comment

Inspiration

One of the team members had a problem of finding offices like Bursar office, Admission, and the Financial Aid Department during his first semester. Since it was a registration period, there are a lot of students in front of the Information Desk and he had to wait a long time to ask the direction to the Financial Aid Department. This delayed his time to finish up his documents for the school. Furthermore, we believe that a lot of students So, we came up with this idea to create a BMCC Directory by using Amazon Alexa App.

What it does

This will help students to know the location to the BMCC offices by simply asking Alexa. This can reduce the waiting time for the students in front of the information desk to ask the direction to the offices. This can also be helpful for students who need special accessibilities, for students who do not have time to come to the Main Building where the information desk located and for students who are shy and do not want to talk to people. This will also help students to get more involved in school events and get to know more about what is going on around the school campus.

Challenges we ran into

Not able to ask for a specific event, Need to go through a list of events for one day only, Alexa console registers the input in lowercase only, but the departmental records have both lowercase and uppercase.
The time interval between the scrapping data from the BMCC website around 6 or 7 seconds

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Alexa console registers the input in lowercase, in a way to compare the input with our departmental records, we figured a way to make every outcome case-sensitive.

What we learned

How to use Amazon Web Services, Amazon Alexa, node.js, lambda, cheerio, ASK(Alexa skill kits), SDK

Built with

Amazon Web Services, Amazon Alexa, node.js, lambda, ASK(Alexa skill kits), SDK

What's next for BMCC Hub

To make it better and more user-friendly. For events, we plan to add these following items- allowing students to search for a specific event, lessening the waiting time to get the answer back from Alexa. For departments, we plan to add more information, for example, the office hours, and the events if there is one. We will plan to use MySQL and RDS and DynamoDB for databases.

Share this project:

Updates