SMART LIVING HACKTHON

I participated in a competition called Smart Living Hackathon on 23 June. Although my team did not manage to get shortlisted, it was an interesting and new experience for me. Before the actual hackathon day, an email was sent to us, encouraging us to try out simple coding for Google Assistant. Being very intrigued and excited, I actually tried out the codes and followed the instructions. It was a pretty intriguing experience as it was something that was not taught to me in school and was thus something very new. After going through and doing the steps by myself, I was able to understand the gist of how Google Assistant works. Although to me, it was very hard to program an actual running demo out as I have barely any skills. Moreover, with JavaScript being the main programming language that was used, I was struggling with it as my knowledge on JavaScript is not very deep. I honestly felt that from following the tutorial that was sent to us, I gained many new knowledge and felt that it was a very enriching experience.

On the competition day, other than listening through the talks of how Google Assistant functions and some other stuffs, we were required to send in our ideas by focussing on one of the themes. There were 2 themes which are Smart Home and also Voice Assistant. What my team had came up with was to make use of Voice Assistant for the purchasing of products and also having secure payment system. We brainstormed ideas and decided on creating an interactive system whereby Google Assistant will prompt for the user’s likes and dislikes, what they are looking for, what colour they like, their preferred type of clothing and many more. We also planned for our Google Assistant to get the data of the user’s birthday, the current season of where the user is at, the weather of where that user is at and many more that will be contributing factors to increase the accuracy of  recommendation of the product for the user. We then proceeded to brainstorm good ideas on how to make the payment system secure using Voice Assistant. We came up with using a keypad that produces music upon the tapping of different numbers and instead, the user has to remember the melody to know which numbers to press which thus increases security. Other than that, we came up with something similar which is the use of Morse Code. The system functions by having the user authenticate by tapping his phone with beats similar to a Morse Code which acts as his password. Another idea we came up with was instead of having the One-Time-Pin only producing numbers, words can be used. For example, if the OTP produces the word cat, the user can speak into his phone with the sentence “I have to feed my cat at home”. This way, it is not suspicious even if he/she were to say his/her password in public. The system will then recognise that he has actually said the right OTP and proceed with a successful authentication. The other ideas were more minor where we just make use of voice recognition and voice frequency for the system to authenticate.

After coming up with all these ideas, we decided to start on the programming of the system. After a period of time starting on our idea, a mentor came to us and tried to understand our idea. (The person on the left in the picture) After explaining our ideas to him, he thought that our system is way too diverse and has too many functions. He stated that our recommendation of the products should stick to recommending only one type of product. That was when my team decided to focus on fashion and clothing as we thought it will be popular among youngsters and moreover, it is common for many to carry out online shopping nowadays. Moving on from the recommendation of products, our mentor stated that our idea of secure payment transaction is actually creative and is a great idea. He especially liked the Morse Code as he thought it is a creative idea and would be interesting to use. Therefore, after much discussion, we finally finalised what we will be focussing on.

We started to work on the coding of our product. However, we faced many difficulties as we had to use what little knowledge we have to program this complicated product which we came up with. Even until towards the end of the first day, we were unable to come up with a proper demo which was something that was required from us for our pitching on the second day. Despite trying our best to refer to the tutorial and twist our steps to get the right output, we could not make it in time and ended up not being shortlisted. Although we did not manage to get shortlisted, I still personally feel that this is a good experience for me as after this, I would know what to expect in competitions and how it normally runs. In addition, I also took with me the knowledge which I gained of using the Google Assistant that may come in useful if I were to come up with a project involving its use. Therefore, I felt that this experience has actually broadened my horizon and allowed me to gain exciting new experiences that proves to be useful for me in the near future or even now, which made me feel that this is not a wasted effort and time.