Eazy-A

Conversation with Alexa
Eazy-A: Multiple Views

Inspiration

Studying can be hard, especially when you’re online. COVID-19 has forced all students to change their study habits, with little time to adjust. We’ve all been there - cramming for an exam the night before and having a hard time retaining the material. According to a study done in 2008 by Karpicke and Roediger, testing yourself for a quiz is much more effective than repeatedly reading your notes. This phenomenon is called the “The Testing Effect”. Research suggests that taking a test enhances long-term retention more than spending an equivalent amount of time repeatedly studying notes. Sadly, many students are unaware that testing themselves is a far better strategy than reading their textbook or reviewing over notes. This research inspired us to create Eazy-A.

What it does

Eazy-A is an Alexa skill designed to help you study. It combines Amazon Alexa’s voice technology with Google docs to create verbal quizzes from a test bank. Essentially, Alexa reads a test bank*/Studynotes from a google doc and converts it into a voice activated quiz, asking the individual with questions already populated. It’s a super fun, effective and unique way to study away from your computer screen for any subject. *Test bank is a mock quiz used to test one’s knowledge before an exam.

How we built it

After we designed and made a prototype of our application on Figma, we developed our Alexa Skill on the Amazon Developer Console using Javascript. In order to be able to read the test banks on Google Docs, we applied a Google Drive API to allow us to connect to the drive with an authenticated access token.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we ran into was connecting the Amazon Alexa skill with Google Docs. We spent a large amount of our time trying to fix this error which caused us to reevaluate how much time we had for designing and creating a video. Luckily, there were documents that explained how to connect Google Doc and Google Drive APIs with your application to use their features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of building an Amazon Alexa skill for the first time in a hackathon! We rarely saw projects in other hackathons built using this platform despite the advantages voice technology can have in terms of accessibility and innovation.

What we learned

Most of our team had never used the Amazon Developer Console before this hackathon. For those of us who had, our knowledge was limited to the basics. Our team learned how to make a functioning Alexa Skill on the Amazon Alexa Developer Console while integrating APIs. In addition, we also learned about various studying techniques and how testing yourself is more efficient than repeatedly reviewing notes.

What's next for Eazy-A

We would love to add support for more languages to our skill to increase our user base. In addition, we want to improve Alexa’s SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) to allow the skill to be more personable.