Hack UTD 2019

Alexa-Events-at-UTD

Alexa skill which tells the user about the events happening on campus at UT Dallas, and allows the user to add events to the user's calendar.

What happens with the skill?

• We web scraped event dates and names from Comet Calender UTD: https://www.utdallas.edu/calendar/
• Added events of the current week to the Alexa skill which Alexa tells to the user when asked.
• After hearing about the events, Alexa allows the user to save any of the events to his or her calendar.
• [In progress] Separate the events into different categories to allow the user ask for specific events e.g. "Alexa, tell me about sports events this week".
• [In progress] A filter process through which Alexa only tells the users the events the user might like. We will initially ask for top 3 preferences from the user and make Alexa tell you about those specific events.

How we built it?

• Node.js for both VUI of Alexa and on back-end using Lambda.
• Web scraped dates and names of events using jQuery and https to access university calendar website.
• Converted scraped data to JSON packages which Alexa can read and tell the users about.

Challenges we ran into

• This was our first time working on an Alexa skill, and also none of us had much experience with JavaScript
• Integrating the back-end on Lambda with the front-end VUI of Alexa was tricky
• Web scraping from UTD's website was also quite new for us

What we learned

• Node.js
• Web scraping
• Working with Alexa

Members

• Zunayed Siddiqui
• Emanel Urbina
• Hoang Vo
• Talha Gudda

Built With

• https
• javascript
• jquery
• json
• lambda
• node.js