Rise: Goal Tracking

Goal tracking Alexa skill focused on you achieving your biggest goal

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Inspiration

By creating this Alexa skill, I wanted to empower other individuals to achieve their goals by realizing the progress they're making on their goal. During my college experience, I struggled with maintaining focus and completing programming projects. I wanted to work for Google but didn't put in the effort necessary to be given the opportunity. Ever since the beginning of my junior year of college, I began tracking the time I spent on my goals. I feel like I have been more productive than ever and as a result, am close to accomplishing my long term goals. My goal is to share this same insight with my peers through this Alexa skill and hope they can achieve their dreams.

What it does

Allows a user to track one long term goal. They can set a new goal, revise their old goal, add time to their goal, ask for advice on how to accomplish their goal, and view statistics about their goal.

How I built it

I built this application using Javascript in conjunction with the Amazon-Alexa-SDK. I used the Alexa Skills Kit that is hosted on AWS Lambda. Furthermore, this skill retrieves product information from Amazon through the Amazon Product Advertising API and stores user information in a DynamoDB.

Challenges I ran into

Learning the Alexa SDK framework was a big challenge for me. I religiously studied the github.com/alexa repository to learn the framework to understand what was happening under the hood. Coming into this hackathon, I had very little experience with javascript and had never touched the Alexa SDK so I pushed myself to learn a new skill by reading the documentation online and talking to Rob, the Alexa representative at HackPrinceton. In addition, I had a difficult time creating sample utterances. These sample utterances are what Alexa uses to determine what the user is trying to do in the skill. It was challenging for me to put myself in the user's shoes and think about what they would be asking my skill.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am exceptionally proud of my diligence to start and finish this project. As mentioned earlier, I had not used the Alexa SDK and my javascript skills were below average. I pushed through every obstacle that came at me and finished before the time with a complete product.

What I learned

Amazon Alexa SDK, how to use the Amazon Merchant API, how to focus on things that needed to be done instead of inconsequential details, and how to design flow of speech for personal assistants.

What's next for Rise: Goal-Tracking

The next steps include adding a simple user experience, allowing a user to track more than one goal at a time, and lastly, creating a library of resources the user can look back upon when they are pursuing their goal.

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