Home Stock

Home Inventory Management

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Inspiration

We were inspired by such occurrences (in our own household too!) wherein poor inventory checks led to deficits or overstocking of day-to-day items. Hence, we wanted to create an efficient skill to maintain the home inventory in a fun way. This skill is designed in such a way that the members at home can maintain and monitor the inventory at their own convenience, at every instance of usage of the item.

This skill allows the user to refresh an item, use an item, get the shopping list by a specified category, check the number of items available, as well message the shopping list to the user specified number. This skill, provides a convenient way to update a stock position at home whenever a person uses an item.

Hence, this skill can be considered as a centralized management of the home inventory. It saves time to check on each item available at home. It is more convenient for people to maintain their stock in a separate category such as medicine, baby care, fruits, vegetables, grocery etc.

What it does

A useful Alexa skill to maintain, monitor and track the home items inventory with a simple interactive decisions made between Alexa and the user. At many households, family members tend to forget what they require to buy while going shopping for their grocery, medicine, baby care, fruits, vegetables or personal care items. Only after returning home from the store, they remember and feel irritated for missing out on a few essential items. This occurs as people lose track of the usage of day-to-day items to build their shopping list, which leads to lack of availability of important items at home, when needed - further leading to some inconvenience, anger or uncomfortable issues among the family members.

How we built it

We built it using Python 2.7 (AWS Lambda environment), AWS DynamoDB (AWS Lambda environment), Way2SMS integration for sending the shopping list as a message to the user.

Challenges we ran into

Setting up and designing the potential item names, categories, start of words of a phrase, end words for a phrase which is to be recognized by the Skill's various intents.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is very useful skill to maintain, monitor and refresh items in different categories. The skill can grow the inventory by user's inputs and can be maintained over a period of time. It can clear the items and can be refreshed with new items. We believe this skill will be of great use by the users at home in a day to day basis and to maintain and monitor their essential products and keep them available at home. Integration with Way2Sms allows the skill to send message to the mobile number specified by the user and with the consent of the user.

What we learned

If Alexa misses to recognize the accent of the user, the skill might behave differently

What's next for Home Stock

Integrate the shopping list with external applications to order online through superstores such as grocery , pharmacy, Amazon Pantry by sending the shopping list with the number of items required.

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