Inspiration
We both came to the hackathon without a team and couldn't generate ideas about our project in the Hackathon. So we went to 9gag to look into memes and it suddenly struck us to make an Alexa skill that generates memes. The idea sounded cool and somewhat within our skill-sets so we went forward with it. We procrastinated till the second day and eventually started coding in the noon.
What it does
The name says it all, you basically scream at Alexa to make memes (Well not quite, speaking would work too) We have working website www.memescream.net which can generate memes using Alexa or keyboard and mouse. We also added features to download memes and share to Facebook and Twitter.
How we built it
We divided the responsibilities such that one of us handled the entire front-end, while the other gets his hands dirty with the backend. We used HTML, CSS, jQuery to make the web framework for the app and used Alexa, Node.js, PHP, Amazon Web Services (AWS), FFMPEG to create the backend for the skill. We started coding by the noon of the second day and continued uninterruptible till the project was concluded.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into challenges with understanding the GIPHY API, Parsing text into GIFs and transferring data from Alexa to web-app. (Well waking up next day was also a pretty daunting challenge all things considered)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud our persistence to actually finish the project on time and fulfill all requirements that were formulated in the planning phase. We also learned about GIPHY API and learned a lot from the workshops we attended (Well we're also proud that we could wake up a bit early the following day)
What we learned
Since we ran into issues when we began connecting the web app with the skill, we gained a lot of insight into using PHP, jQuery, Node.js, FFMPEG and GIPHY API.
What's next for MemeScream
We're eager to publish the more robust public website and the Alexa skill-set to Amazon.
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