Inspiration
Amazon Alexa is making it easier than ever to bring people closer to the information most relevant to them. Food is relevant to everyone, and we wanted to help bring Dartmouth students closer to information about their meals.
What it does
Our Alexa app answers a large number of questions regarding DDS services and frequently updates its information to be as accurate as possible.
How we built it
We set up a python scraper which stores DDS specials in a mongodb database, hosted on heroku.
We then wrote a separate python script for the back end of the Alexa, which figures out the user's intent and responds appropriately depending on what they said.
We also had to add training data to the application in order for it to learn which questions link to which intents.
Challenges we ran into
None of us had used Alexa before, so getting use to the framework provided by Amazon took a lot of time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to have learned how to build apps for a new platform within such a short period of time. We are also proud of the fact that while not world changing, our app can make a real difference in terms of student's relationship and engagement with information about their food.
What's next for Dartmouth Dining for Alexa
We have only scraped the Foco and Collis parts of the DDS website for their daily menu, so in the future we will configure our script to scrape The Hop as well.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.