The Wegmans' Assistant

Inspiration

We were inspired by the increased usage of smart assistance in day to day life. And thought of extending the Wegmans experience to this domain.

What it does

The app provides an interactive user interface controlled by speech to text inputs processed by GCP at the backend. The features include: 1) Connecting to your nearest Wegmans store. 2) Checking the availability of a product (choices provided). 3) Upon selection of a product, the availability at the nearby store and prices is also provided.

How we built it

1) The two integral components- namely google assistant sdks and the Wegmans API were split amongst us in groups of 2. 2) Starting from scratch we combed through the vague documentation behind the action and the DialogFlow SDK. The Wegmans API was latched onto for retrieving the inventory information in the sequence required. Axios and Promises were used to retrieve information asynchronously. 3) The Front end, covered at the google assistant end was coordinated with contexts and actions to simulate the execution flow of the application. Cards and Carousels were used to enhance the viewing experience.

Challenges we ran into

1) The SDKs for google assistant were unfinished and extremely vague with details. That meant we had to use our intuition and some deep search through stack overflow and developer forums to look for answers. 2) The Wegmans API, though relatively easy to access was limited in the access is provided. Hence We had to use some external APIs for filling in the gaps. 3)The bugs were innumerable but a fun challenge to overcome. 4)Promises, while providing a good asynchronous processing proved a hindrance to the functional logic that the google assistant application followed. We learned how to circumvent that with the help of mentors. 5) Once we realized that Google Firebase didn't allow access to any API outside of Google, the GC team timely provided us with $50 credit and we managed to overcome that challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) We learned up learning a lot over the course of 24 hours! Yesterday the bare idea of doing a project like this would have been impossible. 2) We successfully completed our first hackathon, without any sleep. 3) We performed good teamwork throughout the course of the day.

What we learned

1) Teamwork 2) Learning to overcome challenges by not sleeping and not giving up. 3) action SDK, DilogueFlow SDK, a peek at Wegmans API. 4) Using Firebase for backend cloud related processing.

What's next for The Wegmans Assistant

1) We plan to incorporate images (already have a stub commented out in the code). 2) chance to interact with customer care. 3) Provide directions to the nearest Wegmans.

Built With

• dialog-flow
• firebase
• google-assistant-action-sdk
• javascript
• node.js