HackBooks | Devpost

Inspiration

We were looking to create an app for the Google Home that would be something that people would actually use. After tossing around many ideas, we decided this would be a cool concept. We all like to read but it can be hard to find a good book. Book lists can sometimes be overwhelming so we wanted something that would narrow these choices down.

What it does

Simply ask the Google Home to recommend a book and our app searches through a large database of book information scrapped from the internet that includes a book summary and ratings (from GoodReads). It asks you a series of questions to narrow down the category and then recommends a book based on the results. Finally you can chose to hear a summary of the book and have the option to buy it in the Google Play Store.

How I built it

We used the Google Home interface along with the Firebase database. The majority of the code is written in Javascript Node.

Challenges I ran into

Since the Google Home development arena is so new- the documentation is still evolving. This meant that we often had to do a lot of hunting to find out how to complete tasks. We also struggled to get the database built to pull the data from online.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Hadn't used Javascript recently so I'm happy that I was able to get up to speed so quickly. Also proud of the entire team for staying committed (and staying up very late on very little sleep) to get this project done.

What I learned

More Js Node. The Google Home interface... How to set up a database.

What's next for HackBooks

Since we didn't have much time, we weren't able to implement our full vision of using Machine Learning to further refine the categories and ask more relevant questions. Already started to build this implementation and we will soon submit this to the Google Play Store!