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Sustainability Bot in Action
Inspiration
If 2020 taught us anything, it is that environmental, social, and governance issues (ESG) are a growing concern over the population, and change is inevitable. We recently learned from $GME about the impact that a group of novice investors can have on the stock market. Our goal is to direct the power of investing to corporations that are incorporating ESG criteria into their business.
What it does
Sustainability Bot is an Alexa Skill that, when prompted by the user, randomly generates a fact about sustainable investing.
How we built it
We built our Alexa Skill using the Alexa Developer Console. In the Alexa Developer Console, we selected a customizable Intent, which we coded using the Alexa Developer Console interface and JavaScript.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge was narrowing down our idea to an appropriate scale for the given duration of this hackathon. Sustainability Bot was originally going to be a Twitter bot; however, after not hearing back from the Twitter approval process for 12 hours, we knew that Sustainability Bot would have to take on a different form.
What we loved about our Twitter bot idea is that someone did not have to look up sustainable investing to eventually cross paths with Sustainability Bot. This same idea deterred us from creating a web site or application. That's how Sustainability Bot the Alexa Skill was born.
Another challenge with this project was presenting Sustainability Bot via YouTube. We chose to record Sustainability Bot using the Zoom screen share option; however, Alexa can not be heard in the recording.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Sustainability Bot effectively spreads information about sustainable investing. We are proud of its ability to interact with interested users and can't wait to see what it does next!
What we learned
In researching for this project, we learned about sustainable investing and its potential future impact. We learned that the Twitter approval process takes longer than a weekend and how to quickly pivot our vision for a given project. During this hackathon, we explored skill presets available in the Alexa Developer Console, where we eventually decided to go with a more customizable option and expand on our JavaScript coding skills.
What's next for Sustainability Bot
Sustainability Bot could start the Alexa Certification process as soon as today! However, Sustainability Bot could be approved upon by connecting it to more facts about sustainable investing via an API.
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