Doctor Alexa

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Inspiration

At the beginning of QHacks, we were extremely excited to see that the Amazon Echo was available for use. Our team had a ton of fun interacting with the smart technology and decided to use it to make a difference. We initially thought of using Alexa to censor inappropriate language in music, but found it more meaningful to make a friendly AI focused on the well-being of its users.

What it does

Dr. Alexa aims to reduce the stigma around mental health by providing individuals with someone to talk to at all times. Users are able to have conversations with Dr. Alexa regarding their well-being.

How we built it

Dr. Alexa was built by creating a custom skill for Amazon's Echo device using Javascript and Amazon Web Services.

Challenges we ran into

The major difficulty that was encountered was our team's inability to create a local environment to code with. This would have allowed us to take advantage of more APIs and add more functionality to Dr. Alexa. Furthermore, only one person was able to code at a time, which was a huge challenge to ensure that no code was overwritten.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud that we were able to add a custom skill to Alexa and have her respond with specified outputs. No members of our team had ever worked with the Amazon Echo before and it was extremely rewarding to learn more about how it worked.

What's next for Dr. Alexa

In the future, we hope to use machine learning to allow Dr. Alexa to give smarter, more personalized response. Dr. Alexa's capabilities are currently limited in terms of what the program understands. By allowing it to adapt to the English language and speech, the voice commands, grammar, and situations can be less concrete and more flexible for each given case.