My Home Memories

Alexa helps us share personal memories and knowledge like never before.

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Inspiration

My mother used a touch-based 'smartphone' for the first time a month before i left home for the US. Though she has basic English conversational skills, she struggles to operate and type on her phone. And in my busy life, I sometimes don't give her messages (and forwards giving advice on everything under the sun) the attention they deserve. What if there was an intimate Cloud for the just the two of us? My mom could add all the recipes she desperately wants me to try whenever she remembers them. I could add my experiences cooking it. She could later go through all my experiences because who doesn't like a bout of nostalgia. And what if Alexa could answer specific questions about her note? What if we could generalize recipes to visits, songs and other experiences in general? Can two people find respite in these little messages when the other cannot be available at the other end of a phone?

What it does

  1. User 1 can add, modify recipes. User 2 can add experiences while cooking it. User 2 can also ask contextual questions while cooking: "Alexa, I've added two tablespoons of salt already, how many more should i add?"
  2. User 1 can leave technical instructions for accomplishing a task, for example sending an email in Gmail (including personalized reminders and gotchas). User 2 can ask questions about these instructions as many times as they wish?
  3. User 1 can recommend a song to user 2 and Alexa can play to user 2 when asked.
  4. Retrieve memories of a certain day and user can walk down these memories that are linked to each other.
  5. User can add experiences as general notes which we try to analyze and classify.
  6. Interact with Lex API to order flowers.

How we built it

  1. Amazon Alexa's developer APIs
  2. Amazon AWS
  3. Python Flask
  4. NodeJS

Challenges we ran into

  1. Understanding the interaction model of Alexa and getting it to work.
  2. Getting Echo, the device, to work
  3. Setting up the communication pipeline between Alexa and our application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. An application that our mothers can start using soon!

What we learned

  1. Alexa has so much potential!
  2. Alexa has opened up limited capatibilities.
  3. A VM always goes down after a DNS record has been updated to point to it.

What's next for My Home Memories

  1. Add more flows in the skill.
  2. Improve the NLP and conversational abilities.
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