Uninterrupted

Inspiration

The presidential debate was a mess. Neither candidate could get through a response without being interrupted by the other. The people deserve to know the candidate's positions.

What it does

Uninterrupted is an Alexa skill. You tell Alexa a hot debate topic and how long you want the candidate responses to be. Alexa will deliver summarized information regarding that issue directly from candidate websites or statements.

How I built it

Uninterrupted was built using Voiceflow, which makes calls to our custom API. We used a Google Cloud SQL database. To gather and summarize candidate stances on the issues, we utilized the MeaningCloud text analytics API. All code was written in Python.

Challenges I ran into

We did our coding with languages and technologies previously unfamiliar to us. We ran into problems developing our API and having it interact with our Google Cloud SQL database. It was also surprisingly difficult to find actual policy stances from the candidates on many of the topics we wanted to include.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We got to build a product in an entirely new space! None of us had built an Alexa app before or used Voiceflow, so we're proud we were able to put together a relevant and fun application experience.

What I learned

When pressed for time, make sure to outline a deliverable that is actually achievable. We felt like this project was about the right amount of work for this Hackathon. We also learned that working with new technologies is fun! It's always nice escaping the ordinary, even if it's only for 24 hours!

What's next for Uninterrupted

We hope to add more candidates, so users can create their own custom debate floors. We also hope to add more topics that users can learn about on Uninterrupted. Some candidate responses are not very focused on the topics and have minor speech bugs we would like to fix.