Echo Personal

Alexa skill that enables housemates to personalize their Echo experience through profile creation & identification.

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Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project came from the understanding that mostly, a single Amazon Echo connected to one account is used by entire families, households, group of friends, and college roommates. This led us to realize the need of customizability in Alexa for multiple applications including playing personalized playlist, reading out notifications on a particular user's connected smartphone, reading out schedules, personal to-do list, reminders, among other unique user applications. Building up on this idea, we are developing an Alexa skill that would let Alexa enroll multiple users as different profiles identified by their unique voice prints, and henceforth, respond to each user distinctly. Also, from our personal experience of being in group gatherings or parties, we thought about a need of a temporary blocking control that one could use to block all other voices from giving commands to Alexa for a specified period of time, therefore, Alexa would only listen to that user for # minutes unless overruled using account.

What it does

Echo Personal creates unique personal profiles for multiple members using the device with associated unique characteristics such as 'My Playlist', 'My Work', 'My schedule' and so on.

How we built it

This Alexa skill is written in python and lets the users create profiles using a 4 digit pin and a person's name/id. Following that, playlists, work location, and other characteristics can be added to the profile that would assist Alexa in customizing its responses to each member.

Challenges we ran into

As we were trying to utilize Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs to do voice recognition for identifying different users speaking to alexa, we faced problems transferring audio files from alexa to run on the Microsoft API.

What we learned

We hadn't experienced building Alexa skills before so it was great learning about lambda functions and using them to create new skills.

What's next for Echo Personal

We want to build multiple Alexa skills that collectively would be able to do effective profile enrollment and identification, and use the information about user profiles to perform a wide array of personalized applications.

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