Touch Base - Stay in touch

• 

  Touch Base

Inspiration

People are often busy in their daily lives and rarely connect with their old friends and distant relatives. To solve this problem, we have created Touch Base Alexa skill.

What it does

You can add your friends in Touch base Alexa skill and the skill will remind you of whom you should contact.

For e.g. you can say, Alexa, ask Touch base to add Tom. This will add Tom as your friend in Touch base Alexa skill. You can add several friends like this.

Let's say you have added three friends, Tom, Mark, and John. Let's say you have contacted Tom today but you haven't contacted Mark since last 7 days and John since last 20 days.

If you say, Alexa, ask Touch base, whom should I contact today, Alexa will tell you, you should contact John today as you have contacted John 20 days ago.

Once you have a chat or phone call with John, just say Alexa, tell Touch base, that I have contacted John. This will let Touch base skill know that you have contacted John today.

Now, if you ask, Alexa, ask Touch base, whom should I contact today, it will tell you that you should contact Mark as you have contacted Mark 7 days ago.

Alexa, ask Touch base, who all are my friends will tell you the list of all the friends you have added and Alexa, ask Touch base to remove John, will remove John from your friend list.

At any point, if you need any help, just say, Alexa, ask Touch base to help me.

How I built it

This skill is built just by using the tools provided by Amazon. I used Alexa skill builder to build the interface or interaction model and used AWS lambda to run the backend code. I used Amazon dynamoDB to save the data.

Challenges I ran into

Saving data into the database was one of the challenges. Apart from that, adding doing all the coding on online code editor was a bit of challenge especially while adding new node.js packages but somehow I managed to do it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I managed to create the skill successfully and it works exactly as I thought. I am really proud of it.

What I learned

I learned how to use the latest tools provided by Amazon to build a brand new skill from scratch. I learned how to save data in the database and how to test and publish your skills.

What's next for Touch base - Stay in touch

We will add email and phone number features for Touch base skill. We are also planning to create a web interface where you can add your friends and manage them.

Built With

• amazon-dynamodb
• javascript
• lambda
• node.js