Interac Assistant

Inspiration

It's hard to split bills and keep a track of who owes you money when you're out having a good time at a dinner or a party. We decided to make this easier by letting Google Assistant handle this so that you can forget about the money and enjoy with your friends.

What It Does

Our project uses Google Assistant to allow you send money request (Email/SMS) to people who owe you. It stores the name of the person and the amount he/she owes so that you can request the person for the amount later on. Further, it allows you to keep a track of all the people and the total money they owe. You can leverage this Google Assistant feature even on your Google Home products to make it an interactive and fun experience when you are at home.

How We Built It

We used DialogFlow to create Google Actions for the Interac Assistant and used Firebase to store contact information. The transactions were handled through Interac's E-Transfer API. The backend was written in JavaScript and was used to integrate the E-Transfer API with various DialogFlow Intents. For the SMS notifications, we used Stdlib's Utils SMS API.

Challenges We Ran Into

We had trouble integrating the E-Transfer API with DialogFlow. We weren't sure of the correct way to link external APIs with DialogFlow Intents and Google Cloud functions. Also, this was our first experience with Node.js environment.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

We learnt to create actions for Google Assistant/Home and to use Interac E-Transfer API. We were successful in making individual parts of the project work as standalone modules.

What's Next For Interac Assistant

The next step would be to add an online budgeting dashboard which allows you to see statistics for each contact and each month.

Built With

• firebase
• google-cloud
• google-dialogflow
• interac-api
• javascript
• stdlib