College Financial Helper

Inspiration

College Students all over the United States aren't too keen on checking their financial data/information. That is why we have integrated Citi Bank API into the Amazon Echo to use Alexa to check their data with their voice.

What it does

A user can easily ask for their balance on their credit card by saying "Alexa, ask Georgia Tech Bank to check my balance." Anything that the user can find on the Citi Bank website can be found out through Alexa. It is programmed to be as friendly as possible to provide encouragement for the user.

How we built it

Simply say "Alexa, Georgia Tech Bank" and it will talk about how we built it. If you can't talk to the echo, then I guess we can explain it here. We used a variety of services including Amazon Web Services Lambda for the function calls, node.js for the actual code, and we used Alexa Skills for natural language processing. The entire program is powered by using the Citi Bank API to get information about the card.

Challenges we ran into

There were MANY MANY problems we ran into but were eventually able to overcome. One big problem we faced early on in the comeptition would be the fact that the Amazon Echo would not connect to the wifi and that stopped us from having a working physical product. Even when we were able to connect to a hotspot, there would be times where it lose connection. Another problem we faced would be trying to use Google Cloud Functions over the AWS Lambda functions. Amazon Alexa skills pairs really easily with Lambda but we tried to use Google Cloud Functions over it due to various reasons including "because why not". Though we did fail to try and getting it up and running on Google Cloud, we were able to confirm with a Google Cloud engineer that it was possible

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Solving all the problems and challenges over the course of the project was the most frustrating and satisfying thing. We all used our strengths to help one another achieve the end product.

What we learned

We learned so much about how APIs work and how servers and smart home products interact with one another. We as a team really underestimated the amount of work this project would take. We thought it would simple to make Alexa listen and make it call an API request. After finishing the project, we all have a much better understanding of how products work with one another.

What's next for College Financial Helper

Security: implement Alexa skill to prompt user for a certain pin/password before disclosing sensitive banking and account information

User input: allow Alexa to take user input, such as the value of a recent withdrawal/transaction, and add it to a user-created running total of the category/type of that expense (using Microsoft’s Azure database). For instance, if the student made a $5 purchase on Starbucks, Alexa could file that expense under a coffee category. Additionally, because the total amount spent in a particular category can be updated, the user will be able to set spending limits on certain categories, and once his/her account balance draws near that limit, Alexa will warn of reaching the impending spending limit.

Saving: College Financial Helper can already check the student’s account balance; however, in the future, we hope the user will be able to tell (user input) Alexa the cost of an item for which he/she is saving and ask if, based on his/her current balance, he/she will be able to afford the item. If not, Alexa will then inform the user of how much he/she still has to save until the item can be purchased.

Currency conversion: many students attending college in the US are international students, and converting to other currency types is just one of numerous stressful factors of attending college in a foreign country. Inversely, a large portion of college students across the country choose to study abroad at some point(s) during their college career. In order to lessen the burden of living abroad for the aforementioned students, an additional Alexa skill for currency conversion will be able to take the currency type of the user’s account and inform the user of a conversion of his/her current balance to a currency type of choice using current conversion rates.

ATMs: when prompted, Alexa will be able to inform the user of a list of nearby Citi ATMs within a user-designated radius. This is especially helpful for students who haven’t previously lived in the area in which they are studying.