Inspiration
In this busy social media heavy life, people tend to forget keeping track of their payments and end up loosing track of their upcoming and past payments. To make things easy, we could use Alexa, the most intuitive option to help us keep track of our payments.
What it does
Manage your upcoming payments and dues with 3 identifiers - payee, amount and date. This skill lets you build up your personal database of payments, uniquely identifiable with your alexa account user id.
How I built it
Built an API server which allows for database manipulation and exposes these operations as REST services. Then the Alexa skill service would connect with the API service and query for the relevant commands based on user invocations.
Challenges I ran into
Building a foolproof database model, and plugging it with user invocation command - at the same time keeping the API service as flexible as possible was a challenge.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
With this skill I am able to achieve the original intention of keeping track of my own payments. It has easily gelled in as my usual routine without being intrusive - thanks to Alexas' excellent voice recognition capabilities.
What I learned
Building a REST API service ground up, Alexa voice modeling and integrating the skill with the API service was quite an exciting learning curve.
What's next for My Payments Manager
I would love to extend it to include more contextual responses. Currently there is no context based handling, only a direct invocation is handled. Would also like to extend the model and the API service more more complex use cases - like maintaining multiple users in a household, payment modes used, account balances, etc.,.
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