Inspiration
Google search for Digital Divide yields - the lens of unfair nature amongst users who are well acquainted with technology and who are not. In hindsight of the most current pandemic, while most of the problems one can think of are around students' lives, teachers, educators got sidelined. This realization put our primary goal, for this event, around teachers, and the issues they face; the digital divide they experience.
What it does
We have attempted to come up with a solution - where a user gives a voice input to the Voice Assistant to schedule a meeting (for his/her next class). The unique part about this solution is your meeting is scheduled over the calendar and the video conferencing platform as well.
How we built it
Our task number zero - was to determine the current behavior of the selected Voice Assistant (Alexa in this case).
Task one - once we have gauged the operational spectrum of Alexa (for this particular task of scheduling a meeting), we started gathering ideas that can be implemented in the most user-friendly manner while asking for minimal inputs from the user.
Task two - upon having every required inputs, we hit the Zoom API for scheduling the meeting.
Challenges we ran into
We faced several challenges while setting up Alexa skills. Understanding our requirement while keeping AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) in mind was difficult. Integrating Zoom API (Python script) with Alexa skill turned out to be a
Accomplishments that we're proud of
There are many accomplishments, but the primary ones are - we enhanced and reinforced a user-friendly solution for a fundamental problem as scheduling a meeting. We experience the satisfaction you get upon cross-team collaboration and brainstorming for general issues, which are unsolved and present challenges for most business enterprises.
What we learned
Amazon Alexa Developer and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are the core platforms we learned afresh. We sharpen our JSON parsing skills with Python.
What's next for Educate-Me
- Make Educate-Me platform independent (it should also work for MS Teams, Blackboard Collaborate, etc.)
- Important technical issue extraction from the chat of the Video conference platform
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