Alexa, My College Buddy Interim Report Dan Yu, Yanqi Liu, John - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Alexa, My College Buddy

Interim Report

Dan Yu, Yanqi Liu, John Kusner, Lauren Bright Advised by Professor Chuah

Today’s Presentation

Overview Project Challenges Developed Features Q&A Demos Future Goals

Overview

Project Overview

• Improve the lives of college students
• Develop Alexa/Google Home skills to help them...

○ quit smoking ○ cope with academic anxiety

• Create an interactive counselor that is available

24/7

Project Overview (cont)

• Develop questionaires to gather info from

students struggling with (i) anxieties over academic performance, (ii) smoking, and provide tips to help them

• Questionaires accomplied via structured

conversations.

• Develop Group Chat feature to provide peer

support

• In future,
• Research and develop unstructured

conversation

• Possibly add in virtual reality app.

Project Challenges

Ethical Issues

Issues

• Confidentiality
• Medical advice issues
• IRB

Adjustments

• Focus on academic realm
• Keep as much/little personal information as the user is

comfortable with

Alexa Skill Challenges

• Alexa skills are highly restricted

○ No way to capture full utterance or audio ○ Fallback intents don’t include input ○ Skills exit after no response from user ○ Develop skills using Jovo so that can be

easily ported to Google Home.

Group Chat Challenges

• Real time communication is complicated
• Peer-to-peer connections costly with large groups
• External signaling server is required
• Choosing an implementation that

minimizes usage of time and resources

Progress

Major Accomplishments

• Developed an extensible Alexa questionnaire

framework

• Created 6 Alexa skills
• Built group voice chat app with React Native

Extensible Questionnaire Framework

• Abuses loophole in Alexa Dialog fulfillment
• Easy conversation structuring with branching

based on response

• Added NLU support with Wit.ai API connection

John

Quit Smoking - Alexa Skills

• Smoking Health Updates
• Smoking Questionnaire
• Based skills on provided smoking call info protocol
• Responses stored

in a database

Dan and John

Mental Health Progress

• Researched on mental health issues among

college students and professionals ○ Prof. DuPaul ○ Dr. Ian Birky ○ Counseling sessions ○ Active Minds club ○ Reddit

Yanqi and Lauren

Mental Health - Alexa Skills

• Flash Briefings

○ Mental Health Updates

• Questionnaires

○ Mental Health Questionnaire ○ Academic Dialogue

Yanqi and Lauren

Mental Health Progress

• Integrated Wit.ai to achieve entity extraction/NLU

○ Keyword based entity matching

• Finalized structured conversation

○ Time management ○ Test anxiety ○ Understanding course materials

Yanqi and Lauren

Group Chat App Progress

Dan and John

• Decided to use fully connected P2P chat
• Set up AWS cloud machine for signaling server
• Forked open source P2P WebRTC implementation

Group Chat App Progress

Dan and John

• Created demo app for web, in Cordova, and React

Native

• Added username support
• Partially implemented Firebase Cloud Messaging

Future Goals

Next Semester We Will

• Perform real world trials of our Alexa

skills

• Make changes based on user

feedback

• Make our skills work on Google

Homes

Next Semester We Will

• Final product projection

○ Intelligent counselors to help students ○ Counselor handles what sort of issues students are dealing with and responds accordingly ○ Add text based group chat to Android app ○ Explore virtual reality options

Demos

Alexa Skills

Group Chat App

Alexa Skills

Summary

• Project Goal:

○ A tool set consisting of Alexa skills and other apps to improve the lives of college students

• Progress so far:

○ 6 Alexa skills, group chat app

• Next semester:

○ Trial run and get feedback ○ Implement unstructured conversation ○ Explore Virtual reality