Charity Chooser

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  Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

What it does

Gives users a couple of different ways to discover a new charity that they may want to donate to, either with their time or money.

How I built it

I connected to the CharityNavigator API and grabbed their data for thousands of charities around the country. Stored these into a MySQL database and then created my own API around that data, using PHP. Once that was working I created the Alexa ASK-SDK app on AWS and set it up to consume the API and return the relevant information to the Alexa skill.

Challenges I ran into

This was my first time using the ASK-SDK, and I struggled a bit with knowing how to do some things, and which functionality should live in the Alexa skill, which should be on the Node.js/AWS portion, and which should be included in the API.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I think the API setup is pretty slick, and I liked learning more Node.js programming skill.

What I learned

All about dialog management!

What's next for Charity Chooser

I'd like to implement a natural language search. Plus there is probably some cleanup to do in the current code.

Built With

• alexa
• alexa-sdk
• ask-sdk
• mysql
• node.js
• php