Amazon Alexa AI App: 2019-2020

Newcomb Institute's Digital Research Internship Fall 2019 - Spring 2020 AMAZON ALEXA ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MISSION: Develop an AI project for social good

Tulane Trending, is a voiceenabled app that will allow members of the Tulane community to ask questions about life on campus with a single, easy-to-use platform. Once users have activated our skill, they will be able to ask Alexa about various on-campus events and resources, such as hours of operation or phone numbers for services.

To finalize this project, the dev team created a buisness pitch to showcase the product. The interns used the presentation to showcase how they blended social good into a profitable pitch.

Watch the Tulane Trending Pitch: https://youtu.be/U0h-znBdHd4

During production, the dev team faced difficulty implementing Amazon's developer tools. The team researched RSS feeds, AWS calendar tutorials, JSON file structures, and an aggregated news feed tutorial. It was challenging for interns to get a hold of the necessary data in a format that can be used by AWS. Working through the many tutorials was a learning process for the interns, and exposed them to a wide array of technologies.