Alexa Interviewer

Inspiration

So far, the only ways to prepare for any type of interview (for a job, for college admission, etc.) have been to use a book or search up questions online, and do them yourself. However, there's a lot more to passing an interview than simply knowing the answers, and these ways to practice lack any type of social interaction. As such, we decided to create an application in which one can practice for interviews by being asked them in a similar environment to actually getting interviewed, and receive feedback for their responses.

What it does

For the job interview mode, the user starts out by telling the company and position they want to apply to, after which it prompts for answers to questions. For the custom interview mode, it uses questions that the user submits online in advance.

How we built it

The Alexa skill fetches interview questions for specific companies from Glassdoor. These are user-submitted questions from actual people who had an interview at the same company, who chose to post their questions online. The user-submitted questions are stored in a DynamoDB. The application is written in Python with Flask-ask, Zappa.

Challenges we ran into

As we were building the skill, we ran into issues trying to query DynamoDB with Alexa. The servers simply wouldn't connect and mentors were unable to fix the problem. We think this is a glitch on Amazon's side.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We wrote our first Alexa skill! It felt very rewarding to create our own application which we could talk to.

What we learned

Coordination is key! Teamwork plays an important part in being able to finish on time. It's important for all team members to contribute anything to the project, even basic assistance. Also, we should have sought help from mentors earlier on so that we wouldn't be banging our heads trying to fix a basic problem.

What's next for Alexa Interviewer

Add more websites that one can use to get questions, such as college websites
Record responses to questions, so user can listen back to it
Add better support for Echo Show so that the question is also displayed, so it's better for deaf users
Add an AI through which Alexa can give feedback on questions, by using machine learning to analyze how well a response would likely be