Voice Assisted Coding with Amazon Echo

Inspiration

Accessibility was a major inspiration for our project. Even with voice assisted coding there is often the problem of still having to interact with the device physically or a decrease in accuracy due to the word by word coding. With our approach, we focus on creating a completely hands-off approach to coding to allow independence for various disabilities with a particular focus on individuals with a visual impairment. Additionally, a focus on a template based coding style which may increase accuracy.

What it does

Allows a user to interact with the Amazon Echo to run a variety of customizable commands that are transferred into a string form, formatted, stored and ready for download and testing.

How we built it

The program is built using JavaScript on the Lambda platform assisted with the Amazon developer console.

Challenges we ran into

Adapting to using Amazon's developer console we found was the most difficult. Overcoming new jargon we had not been familiar with due to the new platform. We spent a majority of the time learning what was possible on the platform and discovering all of its features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning a completely new platform and having a product that is functional was incredibly rewarding.

What we learned

We learned how to use Lambda and the Amazon developer console. Neither of us has ever coded using Alexa or speech recognition so the entire experience was a great look into a whole new area.

What's next for Voice Assisted Coding with Amazon Echo

We look forward to integrating a compiling feature onto an online platform for sandbox usage. Furthermore, we would also like to continue to improve the user experience by working around the limitations of speech to text platforms.