AirAlexa

An Alexa skill that allows users to use Alexa to search or book flights

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Inspiration

Everyone on our team flies often, and we’ve all wanted an easier way to search and book flights.

What it does

Search for American Airlines flights from a source to a destination on a certain date through Alexa. When searching for back-to-back flights it accurately optimizes for the shortest time interval between departure and arrival. Book an American Airlines flight through Alexa.

How I built it

Alexa Skills are like apps. Skills are voice-driven Alexa capabilities. In other words, Skills are the interface between users and Alexa. The development of an Alexa Skill involves developing a set of functions that represent various action flows - where each function takes a JSONized voice command and returns the next dialog. This set of functions can be hosted on AWS Lambda, an event-driven, serverless computing platform offered by Amazon, for remote access.

Challenges I ran into

  1. Free tier AWS severely restricts the way we could employ and utilize cloud services.
  2. Alexa's natural language interpretation is volatile, to say the least so some dialog flows won't perform consistently because Alexa would unexpectedly misprocess/misclassify the intent.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  1. We got the application to work completely flawlessly with the Flight Engine API we were given.
  2. The algorithm to search for connecting flights was non-trivial but it was satisfying at the end.
  3. Pulling the credit card information from the user's Amazon account (thanks to a suggestion from a developer at the American Airlines booth) took a good deal of configuration.

What I learned

We learned a lot about the workflow of an Alexa skill and chatbots in general. It rekindled our interest in event-driven programming and the functional programming paradigm, both of which, we want to explore more of.

What's next for AirAlexa

  1. Support more customization for booking tickets and searches.
  2. Allow the user to book multiple tickets at once.
  3. Connect the user's AA Advantage account to the Alexa skill to make it more personalized and "smarter".

Source Code and Supporting Files

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TNXZi2pfKwUzzF6lBIYMGv_dN9HPlg6T/view?usp=sharing

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