Inspiration
How the inspiration came? Simple, we created before a skill called Birthday Book, which was sending reminders to Alexa users by adding to their To-Do list when a birthday was read from the user Google's calendar.
Then we thought: what if other businesses want to send items to a customer's To-Do list. Currently, the process is quite a tedious task and you need a technical person who has to spend time in developing a skill for Amazon Alexa. It is a nice feature which should be more accessible for everyone. This is what we have done, we created a simple Web API for businesses which sends messages to customers.
What it does
The application flow contains two types of users. 1) The customers, who sign up for the skill with their email address and give permissions for the skill to write in their list. 2) The businesses who send reminders through our Web API to customers.
When the user enables the skill we save their email address in our database. When the business sends a request to our Web API with the email address and the message that they want to send, for example ({email: test@gmail.com, message: "From airline company, your flight AE321 will depart in 24 hours from Heathrow Airport. Please don't forget to check-in online. "}), we take the email address identify that user and send the message in their To-Do list.
How we built it
We used the technologies that we know best. For the skill, we created a Web API in C#. For the website, we created an Asp.Net application with C#, MVC, jQuery, Bootstrap
Challenges we ran into
We build this entire application in two weeks, I think the biggest challenge was to finish before the deadline for this competition. Also, we had the challenge of how to not allow this service to be used for spam, hence when a Business signs up to use this service they go through a certification process before send, we also put rules around what and how often reminders are sent.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Till now, we've felt like a majority of Alexa skills have been based more around providing entertainment value and not actually improving peoples day to day lifestyle. We believe this skill has the possibility of not only helping people in their day to day life but help them interact easier and faster with the services and business that they require leaving them to get on with the more important things in life.
What we learned
First, we improved our technical skills regarding how to integrate a Third Party with an Amazon Alexa Skill. By creating all these skills we realized the pain points that a developer goes through and that this is not very accessible for the end user.
What's next for Daily planner
We want to give the users the possibility to subscribe and unsubscribe from businesses. We want to give the users the possibility to send a message back to the business. To be a two-way conversation, not just one way.
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