Stuffer

Inspiration

"Where did I keep my wallet. Really need it now!"

Do your keys and wallets often vanish to hidden places? Do you often find yourself frustrated, unable to locate your important stuff? How about you ask Stuffer to help you remember this.

Stuffer is an Alexa skill which provides you with features like

• adding items,
• finding items,
• creating event lists &
• maintaining past history.

No more frustrations, no more forgetting things. Enable Stuffer from the Alexa skills store. Now. Happy stuffing !

What it does

Stuffer helps users track their belongings in an intelligent way.

• Simply ask Alexa to add an item. When prompted later, it informs the user of the same.
• Stuffer maintains a history of each and every item ever stored. This History is resorted to in case no match is found.
• Stuffer also tracks items required for an event. Ask Stuff Locator to create an event and then add items to the list. Later list an event out.
• Also, you can individually store these events items and find them too.

How we built it

• This skill is built purely on Node.Js, uses DynamoDB database for keeping track of the user’s items and it’s storage locations.
• Reduced access time: We have used active items table for items that have been recently accessed. Older items are shifted to a separate table. Performance matters.
• Recommendation: For recommending plausible storage locations we create history of the previous locations used for storage.
• We have defined intents for creating event lists.

Challenges we faced

• Implementing the active list: Architecture and design had to be thought over in detail before the implementation was successful.
• VUI model: Interaction model for each intent had to be carefully implemented in order to maximize UX.
• Scraping custom slot values: Slots values for itemName and eventName were scraped from the internet using python scripts for maximum success rate. Including Custom Slots values took our JSON file from 500 lines to 2500

What we learned

Building and using Voice Enabled Applications can be very interesting and informative , specially when you have an awesome team to help you out.

What's next for Stuffer

We have a number of new & interesting features in mind which we plan to incorporate once we have enough people using this skill. It will be v2.0.

P.S.

We have 1K+ views on our Demo Video :tada: :tada:

Built With

• alexa-node-sdk
• amazon-alexa
• amazon-dynamodb
• amazon-lambda
• javascript
• node.js