Inspiration
It was the 2015 when i was financially broken: 150€ in the bank account and a job that merely pay the rent in a city that was not mine. I got a roommate to divide the rent and the general expenses, and we set up a little application in angularJS+PHP to track them. We finally realized how much money went for each aspect of our life and we managed a way to reduce our expenses in a smart way. Now the roommate is my husband, we have great projects for our future, and i think that our little application needs a restyle both in the ease of use and in the functionality.
What it does
It enables the user to track his expenses, saving the amount of the expense, the date and a category under that the expense can be tagged, and to analyze the trend of the expenses time after time. With it the user can track how much the fuel of the car costs in one year, how much he spends for gifts to his loved ones, how much the bills cost in a particular period, and so on, the sky is the limit. Knowing how much our life costs in a particular context permits to make previsions, to dedicate budgets and to take important decisions like moving in another country or changing job. How powerful is to know that with a quick chat with Alexa we can achieve a better life?!
How I built it
I've studied a lot :) i'm an introvert full stack web developer, so i'm not used to design for voice. First, i made clear to me what i would like the skill to do, then i designed some personas and the happy path for the dialog, managing the underfilling and the overfilling, translated all to the Alexa console and finally to the codebase, written in PHP with the Lumen Framework. I don't own an Alexa device with a screen, so i have tested the voice with my Echo Dot and the screen events with the simulator in the test console.
Challenges I ran into
First, the italian language is more difficult than the english one. For example, our verbs have different words for present and infinite form, so i need to double the utterances. We also have a lot of articles that can be used with dates. Second, for PHP there is no SDK, so i made all the code to construct the response by myself. Third, this was the first project i made with Lumen and i enjoyed it very much.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm really satisfied about how designing for Alexa makes me a better developer: not because i've learned another framework, but because a skill puts the user at the center of an application. As developers we sometimes forget that our work has to be used by someone that doesn't know all the context of an argument, creating unsatisfying experiences. Alexa forces us to think constantly about the user, and this is the most precious lesson to learn.
What I learned
This was my first skill with a real dialog and with APL: the dialog is really easy and fun to develop from the script to the code, APL was more difficult but i'm going to iterate on the codebase to manage also this aspect and lose less time debugging my lost parentheses :)
What's next for Registro Spese
I plan to add a category based analysis, a gamification system to incentivate savings, and a budget management system.
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