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

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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 Todays Presentation Project Developed Overview Challenges Features Future Q&A Demos Goals Overview Project Overview


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Alexa, My College Buddy

Interim Report

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

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Today’s Presentation

Overview Project Challenges Developed Features Q&A Demos Future Goals

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Overview

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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

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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.
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Project Challenges

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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

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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.

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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

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Progress

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Major Accomplishments

  • Developed an extensible Alexa questionnaire

framework

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

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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

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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

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Mental Health - Alexa Skills

  • Flash Briefings

○ Mental Health Updates

  • Questionnaires

○ Mental Health Questionnaire ○ Academic Dialogue

Yanqi and Lauren

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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

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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
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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
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Future Goals

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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

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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

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Demos

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Alexa Skills

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Group Chat App

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Alexa Skills

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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