Deal Sniper

Inspiration

Having a great interest in voice assistants, and looking at everyday wants for college students, an idea to create an alexa skill that tells you deals at any brand e.g. Macy's, Nordestorm, Chipotle, etc seemed very appealing to me. Instead of having to browse through web doing a search, you can get these things on the fly just with a voice command.

What it does

Deal Sniper helps you find coupons, deals or offers at a number of brands for which the it supports.

How I built it

Amazon has great resources on learning to create an Alexa skill which I followed. I already had a good background with NodeJS and other components that I required to use for this app.

Challenges I ran into

Getting data for deals. There is no existing free API that one can directly take so I had to write my own web crawler to get this information.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Getting the data that would help advocate the validity of the application towards the purpose it is intended to serve. It is always updated with the latest information so you are very unlikely to get expired information about deals!

What I learned

An insight into voice assistants, SAML for text to speech. It was a rewarding experience.

What's next for Deal Sniper

I have curated product prices across various stores - walmart, best buy, etc for the past few years. The plan is to create a classifier that would be able to tell the user if he should buy the product right now or wait for it looking at historical sale trends for the product. With that in mind, instead of just brands, the aim is to make it compatible with products as well and make it a feature rich application as a one stop shop for all deals.

Built With

• node.js