My Experience with #IndiaBuildsActions
Fresh into college, fresh into the club and it begins with #IndiaBuildsActions!
For a beginner like me, “Intents” meant Purpose, “fulfilment” was not more than an achievement of something but I came to know there is much more to words than just dictionary meanings.
With just the basic knowledge in programming, it was a bit daunting at first. Building an action that people could talk to, seemed like a lot of intense coding skills would be required for it, turned out there was much more to it than just coding. We had already seen the Heritage Helper in action and I was wondering how it might have been built… it was an Action. *couldn’t resist the pun*
The First session started with a lot of commotion. Excitement and confusion of 100+ students with the availability of only 60+ seats. It began with students bringing in chairs from adjacent classes. The infamous “Jugaad”. Everyone was quite excited to be a part of AoG and at the same time wondered as — “what are the software requirements?” “How do we install them?” and most importantly, “Am I just wasting my time, or will I actually be able to contribute in this?”
*Okay, I admit it, I made the last one up*
To be really honest, the senior students of the college or as they call themselves TA<Teaching Assistant> were there to help us out whenever we needed them both technically and mentally.
The event began with the senior quickly going through the slides. It was almost a loop of slides coming up, the theory explained, and the theory related to how heritage helper was built… Honestly, it was all mostly a blur because we were sort of busy setting our IDEs up(*hehe*), this was the first time we experienced a decent code editor like VS Code, git and at the in same time anticipating the hands-on.
Then after all the basic configurations and installation were done, we started working on the Heritage Helper, and that is when the fate turned its back on us :-p
We did the Intent and entities alright,
But it took some time for debugging the fulfillment. The fact that the `instructor` had an error on his screen now wasn’t any more encouraging :-p
To top it all… GITLAB decided to migrate their servers at the same time.
Then we kept trying to debug till the guard came and made us all run away.
I also faintly remember having to fight for the Stickers that were a little too less. :)
Cut to the next session, where we started afresh. Actually better prepared this time, since the master deck had been shared with us, and the codelabs that were awesome. It is pretty obvious that since we all were working of the same project we would encounter some issues, so to discuss this, GitLab provided us with the feature “Issues.” Basically, it’s a great way to keep tracks of tasks, enhancements and bugs for projects like this. We were also given some idea regarding Markdown. GitLab has a syntax for formatting text called the GitLab Flavored Markdown. It has basic features which makes formatting text, comments, interactions with the users and pulling of the requests easier.
The existing Templates provided by the Actions on google console were amazing as in a lot of cases all we didn’t even need to write a single line of code, all we needed to do was just to fill some basic information, add a few questions and the action was created!
However, we skipped that and had to work with Dialogflow. It has a good user-interface, is flexible, and also provides an AI powered system to help understand the user’s intent. We were told that this enabled us to make an app without making the effort of extracting the intents from the string(not sure what that means tho 😜)
I really got interested in Heritage Helper and joined the team. The basic idea was to create our own assistant that would serve the people on the campus as self-help to find the necessary things such as locations of particular Departments Heads, syllabus for coming semesters or even the canteen menu. On top of that, since this would be an open source, people from other institutes would be able to to use it just by modifying it as per their needs.
We began discussing on it’s architecture, built the entire dialog, as a play, and started brainstorming on how it worked.
We were given around 10 links of videos from Google I/O 18, of which one was on how the persona of an assistant can be created. We were to watch them all before the next session. That was a tedious task as none of the videos were less than 40 minutes. The next session was all helter-skelter with no fixed classroom for discussion. In fact, the next three sessions were like that.
We were discussing the plan of action in the canteen or on the stairs or empty classrooms. We were no longer in the role of learners, but developers.
Coming back to the topic of creating a persona for the helper, we had an interactive session where we talked about responses of the helper in different instances and made a rough draft on it. Then came the fun part where we were assigned the work of writing the entire conversation for the Heritage Helper. I was quite excited about working on this. Two of us decided to work on it and made the entire conversation in one night, leaving all the other things which includes our assignments and that night’s sleep. *Which explains the cranky behaviour next morning*
Nothing is perfect, nor was our final conversation draft. There were a few glitches in it, and we are still working on that. Sounds like a night wasted but for me till Bhaiya said ”It’s a great start” and that is exactly what we needed. That’s when we learnt that everything in the industry is made better with iteration. That the final product is built on top of so many un-final versions of it that we don’t see…
It will take a little time to lower my expectations maybe.
In the next session, we discussed other important aspects of the project. It involved coding with Javascript. A few people from the team were intently working on that so much that one of them even forgot to take a bath. For the whole day! *Okay, I shouldn’t have spilled that out :p*
We are all still working on the project hoping to turn it into a huge success. Plus, I am looking forward to the part where I get to write some code as well.
The story has not ended yet. There are still some unanswered questions like, did we manage to make a successful effort? Was it all really worth it? By investing so much time and effort working on it, did we actually serve the purpose for which it was created (Did it really save the time and effort of its users)? Did I actually learn some intense coding? :p
I’ll make sure that I keep you guys updated on what follows.
In the end we all got the stickers by the way :-p
