Tempe Landfill or Recycle

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  Alexa Skill at work

Inspiration

We wanted to create an Alexa skill that would help answer questions that are important to our community.

What it does

Tempe Landfill or Recycle is a skill that answers the question that you might be having right now: is the trash that I'm holding in my hand right now recyclable in Tempe? Simply ask and this skill will answer you and possibly give you further criteria to follow, as demanded by the City of Tempe.

How we built it

We built the Alexa skill in the Alexa Developer Console and Lambda and hosted it on Amazon Web Services.

Challenges we ran into

Going into this project none of us knew how to make an Alexa skill. Some of us weren't even that familiar with Amazon's line of echo products. It took quite a bit of time and effort to learn everything from scratch. Fortunately we were able to receive great assistance from a kind representative at Amazon during the Hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have made a working product to demo. We are also proud to add two new intents to the skill, which inform the user of the recyclables collection schedule and composting information in Tempe.

What we learned

We learned how to make an Alexa skill for the first time. We also learned a little bit on the workings of Javascript.

What's next for Tempe Landfill or Recycle

In the future, it would be great to scale the app to the entirety of Phoenix, then the US, and finally the world. Using the Echo's location services, the skill would look up the recycling information for that area and provide the answers users are desperately searching for on difficult-to-use and low-budget city recycling sites. In the near future though, it would be nice to have the skill available on the Alexa Skills Store, as it is currently still being tested.

Built With

• alexa
• amazon-web-services