Help Me Budget!

The inspiration for this project came from the need for many to start taking control of their financial future. Especially during this time when unemployment rate is at an all time high, there must be something we can control.

This Alexa Skill can be linked to your Echo device. User will feed it "utterances" such as "Add ten dollars to my variable expenses" and it should update its database to keep track of their expenses (the 3 categories are variable expenses, food, bills) and deduct expenses accordingly. User can also customize a budget every month and increase it accordingly. Alexa should be able to respond to an utterance like "How much do I have left to spend on food this month?"

I built it using Alexa Developer Console and AWS Lambda. In ADS, I added intents, sample utterances, and slots for certain key words. Then, using AWS Lambda serverless repository and ask-sdk code generator, I was able to integrate that with ADS to start testing.

I am a beginner, completely new to programming. It was difficult having an idea but not knowing where to start. Many articles and YouTube videos later, I stumbled upon Alexa-Developer-Console which made it relatively possible for the average Joe to create a skill for Alexa. Nonetheless, I was unable to get it to do what I envisioned, which was store expenses in a database and do simple math to calculate total expenses and available funds.

I am proud to have gotten this far in the project where Alexa is able to recognize utterances and give a custom response. I also am proud that I came up with an idea and became my own leader in figuring out where to go from there.

I learned the basics of how an Alexa Skill is built. I also gained exposure to Javascript. I never worked with it in the past.

I need to figure out how Alexa stores input and manipulate the data to do mathematical functions!