SaveTime

Optimize how you spend your time with SaveTime

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Inspiration

Being able to organize your own life by your own will is far more rewarding, and has a potentially greater impact, than always leaning on another for support. I think that SaveTime is a great utility for people looking to improve themselves. It takes away the monotony of keeping track of time, so that users can focus their willpower on improving how they manage their time.

Self-improvement is sometimes overlooked when talking about social good. Usually social good encompasses the good of a whole community, where people provide community services to do social good. However, it is also important to make sure that social good enables individuals to sustain themselves. Constantly giving aid without creating sustainable frameworks for individuals in disadvantageous circumstances can only go so far. I want to be a part of the process that aids individuals in lifting themselves up so that they can go and improve their own community.

What it does

SaveTime tracks how much time you spend doing activities. Users can add time to activities, review their time spent on any day/month/or year, add custom activities to track, and list the activities that Alexa is currently tracking for them.

How I built it

I coded everything in Node.js while using some packages to help with API requests and time manipulation. I had to store the user data somewhere so I stored it into Amazon's dynamo-db with custom ids for easy access. I tested with an echo dot I borrowed and the online simulator.

Challenges I ran into

I have never coded in Node.js before, so I had to learn along the way. I also did not hear about this challenge until 2 weeks prior to the due date, so overall, this has been a challenging project. Some of the API was hard to use, especially since I did not know how to send API requests through node.js.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Learning, and creating a program for Alexa with no experience in Node.js.

What I learned

The way Alexa works is very interesting and amazing. I loved how my code focused on manipulating responses while Alexa took care of the actual dialog.

What's next for SaveTime

  • Add fulfillmentIntent capabilities to SaveTime to allow for a more natural interaction between customer and program.
  • Add a third party application that allows for visual representations of user data.
  • Develop the program to a point where it can be used in medical situations.

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