Inspiration: Talking to anyone--even a machine--about your problems at a convenient moment can help immensely. They just have to be able to guide you through your thoughts. This gave us the inspiration to give Alexa the skill of taking on a therapist role. We believe that its natural language processing abilities give it the capacity to have a conversation with people about their various emotions. Alexa can listen and help.
What it does: Makes Alexa a therapist who can listen to the types of emotions the user is having a respond in an appropriate and helpful manner.
How we built it: We used the Amazon Alexa api to craft a dialogue between Alexa and the user. We anticipated various requests from the user and wrote reactions that Alexa could respond with.
Challenges we ran into: This was the first time anyone on our team coded a skill for Alexa so it was challenging to get started. Another challenge we ran into was testing the skill using the amazon echo dot because we were unfamiliar with the hardware.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: We are very proud of the concept of having Alexa as a therapist. We can see various future paths and expansions that we can explore. We really believe that this skill can be helpful for many people.
What we learned: We learned javascript at an introductory level. This was also our first time creating a hack and found the learning process as a whole very valuable.
What's next for My Therapist: For the timespan of Treehacks, we focused on coding enough so that we could prove our concept. In the future, we want to expand this Alexa skill to be able to respond to more situations. We also thought about the idea of creating a skill for Alexa to take on certain roles of a doctor.
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