Inspiration
We all wanted to learn something new. To use a technology that we were all unfamiliar with and step out of our comfort zone in order to come out of Bitcamp better than when we arrived.
What it does
We added functionality to Amazon's echo AI, Alexa. You can tell her how you are feeling and she will understand your feelings (like machines do) and will play relevant music to sympathize with you.
How we built it
We were able to do this by first creating new intents for Alexa to recognize and key words to look out for. i.e., she would take notice of words such as "happy", "sleepy", "pissed", etc.
Challenges we ran into
This was almost not going to be possible because Alexa requires a wifi connection in order to write code for her. The wifi here at Bitcamp was congested enough to have her reject it the whole time. In order to circumvent this, we hosted our own hot spots so that we could connect to Alexa, much to the disdain of the data plans on our phones. Another problem is that their are no web API's that you could use to stream music for free. So we looked elsewhere for music.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are most proud of the fact that we accomplished our goal. We did something new and fun. We are going to leave Bitcamp knowing a few more things about hardware and human-computer interaction.
What we learned
Now that we have some experience handling actual technology (you don't get much hands on hardware like this in Computer Science), we can push ourselves further to try even crazier things that we didn't consider possible before.
What's next for My Mood
This project was pretty fun and getting Alexa to do whatever we wanted was also really cool. We are looking forward to working more on Alexa in order to help her finish her degree in Human Psychology in order to allow her to become an even greater pal.
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