The Blind Date Club

Inspiration

We have all heard the same themes from people looking for dates, "I want a guy who can make me laugh," "looks really don't matter," "you're standing too close to me." The Blind Date Club was built to help you or someone you know who suffers from making superficial dating decisions. Our dating app for Alexa requires people to connect on a more meaningful level before pictures are exchanged.

What it does

The Blind Date Club creates a social interaction component to Alexa, allowing members to interact with each others' profiles and decide based on mutual interests whether to connect. The application allows you to search for dating profiles with your voice. You can talk to the Alexa device which will ask you several questions and provide you a series of matches based on common interests. If both parties are interested in connecting, Alexa will exchange the users contact information.

How we built it

Our application is an Alexa skill written in Node.js served from a custom HTTPS endpoint using .club TLD. The API is an Express app hosted on an AWS EC2 server instance with continuous integration provided by Drone. The API is defined in Swagger.

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulty getting our Alexa to connect with so many devices in the room.
Testing a custom API endpoint is difficult with the service simulator.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got it to to work despite the wide scope of the project.
All of us were working on an Alexa app for the first time, which was challenging and exciting.

What we learned

We learned how to interface with Alexa on the Echo.
We learned how to work think within the context of a very powerful but very specific framework.

What's next for The Blind Date Club

3rd party authentication
User profiles
Sending personalized voice messages over Alexa
Gamification component in which users must interact a certain number of times before unlocking contact information, fun facts about users, and eventually links to a user's profile pictures.