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The team
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MMIW Logo
Inspiration
Our women are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than other ethnicities and it's the third leading cause of death for our Women.
What it does
Publishes incidences of murdered and missing indigenous women to a public-facing webpage, mmiwdatabase.org. Incidences are submitted via an Alexa enabled device or by a call-box. The Alexa skill works by saying, "Hi Alexa, my unci is missing." (Pronounced oonchee, grandma in Lakota). Alexa then asks when before publishing the event to the website.
How we built it
We used a cloud-native architecture using AWS. The front-end interfaces, the call-box and Alexa skill, communicate with a RESTful API built with Chalice. This API then saves submissions to DynamoDB.
Challenges we ran into
We learned how to develop an Alexa skill and learned how to use Twilio. We learned the limitations of Twilio for phrases and methods of saving recordings. Alexa skills are complex and hard to debug.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our Alexa skill reacts to the utterance, records the date, and location! Our call-box publishes incidences to email (both text and audio recordings!).
What we learned
How to build an Alexa skill and how to make an email Voicemail box with Twilio.
What's next for MMIW
Have the Alexa skill publish the event via an API call which saves the incidence to MongoDB. Use WebHooks to save phone conversation transcriptions to a database. Create a web interface for viewing and managing the incident database.
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