Terabot - 1 Trillion Skills

Custom Skills in 3-5 minutes
It's like the Matrix for Alexa skills
Opportunity
Inspiration
New skill in 90 seconds

Inspiration

Alexa Skills and bots have the potential to change the world in the same way email and HTML did. However,

What it does

It's like the Matrix for Alexa skills. Just upload load a document to the shared Alexa brain and it instantly becomes a skill your friends can download to their brains.

How I built it

We used the Slack API for the upload interface, the Facebook API for the security and some messenger tricks, Docubots API for document parsing (Scala), searched the web for some random heart, health, doctor related spreadsheets (to participate in the Novartis hack also) and of course, the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)

Challenges I ran into

Many of the documents we found on the web (Excel files) had terminology that wasn't user friendly. Not a big deal - no programming required - copy and paste something that was more conversationally friendly, then upload it via our Hack's Slack App (Terabot)

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We've tied together a lot of APIs that rely on a somewhat distributed collection of services and resources. Despite this, the reaction time of the Skills generated on the fly are pretty good. The actual skills themselves are better than what we've seen people charge clients $1,000 to $2,000 for - and ours are free (if the document isn't "complex"). In addition to that, since it's applicable to every industry / domain that uses documents (which means every industry), in theory it can literally save lives, as demonstrated by the sample docs selected.

What I learned

Our project has far greater potential to change people's lives than we realized when we started the hack. It's great motivation to keep working on it.