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Recycle Track
Inspiration
Over the last few decades, waste is being generated at a very high rate. And the impact of this is clearly visible on our environment. While some of us has started showing concern towards this, but for many there is no real motivation to make recycling a daily habit. According to the Environmental Protection Agency recycling is “Collecting, reprocessing, marketing, and use of materials once considered trash”.
As a person who is highly motivated to inspire others to take care of the nature, I decided to motivate my friends and family to make recycling a daily habit. For every item they recycle, I used to tell them the approximate amount of energy they are saving and the duration for which a television or a refrigerator can function using that much of energy to keep them motivated.
Recently, I found out about this competition and I decided to use alexa to spread my words to motivate people for recycling. Moreover, it would be very convenient and meaningful to have a voice interactive way to track recycling progress.
What it does
Recycle Track helps you easily track your recycling progress. Just tell Recycle Track what have you recycled, and it will give you key insights and how it will be helping our environment to keep you motivated to recycle.
You can start by adding an item to your recycling list, and just tell the approximate weight of that item and what material is it made of. You can check progress to see how well you are doing overall in terms of recycling. Additionally, you can ask Recycle Track to tell a random fact about recycling.
How I built it
I started by building out the skill interface including creating intents and writing utterances, and then I wrote the code to handle intents and hosted it on Lambda. Once this was working, I have to link a database with my skill model, so, I learned about DynamoDB, built out the database architecture, and connected the database to the skill service. I tried to keep the conversation between user and alexa to be smooth and engaging.
Challenges I ran into
Connecting DynamoDB database to my skill and ensuring that the data is getting populated in the exact manner, such that it can easily and optimally be retrieved by the skill service was a little challenging.
Keeping the user motivated to pursue recycling was also challenging. I tried to provide relatable insights to the user for their recycling activities to keep them motivated.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I feel good about successfully building a skill that can motivate a large number of user to adapt recycling as a daily habit. Such small step is the key to save our environment and allow our future generations to make use of the natural resources.
I stayed extremely organised throughout the process and the self learning I did during the entire process is something I am very proud of.
What I learned
On the technical front, I learned a lot about Amazon services, including the Alexa Skills Kit, AWS overall, Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3, and about how they all fit together. While I knew basic JavaScript, this was an opportunity to apply what I knew and grow my skills while building something for collective good. Throughout the process, I became much more comfortable searching and asking for help on alexa blogs and other developer friends.
What's next for Recycle Track
I would make the content more dynamic and relatable to end user. I have so many ideas to motivate user to follow recycling and would like to engage them in the best possible way I can in future.
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