Training the next generation of voice developers through hackathons and MLH Localhost
During the Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 seasons, Google Cloud and Actions on Google partnered with Major League Hacking (MLH), the official student hackathon league, to provide students with the resources they needed to build innovative projects during the hundreds of hackathons that took place in North America and Europe. Google and MLH worked to develop a Localhost Module that is student-led and student-trained in order for communities to learn and grow together.
Hackathons are great places to experiment and try new ideas. During my undergraduate years, I attended many hackathons and organized one myself. Everyone gets time to focus on building a prototype, with everything you need to accomplish it. You don’t need to be an expert in a given field, or have access to the highest-end technology, as mentors and MLH are there to help you. It’s a place where you collaborate with others and exchange ideas.
At the end of hacking, you get to show off your project to everyone else. The hackathon is transformed into a tiny world’s fair, where people show off their accomplishments and you get to see everybody’s creativity.
With Google Cloud Platform and Actions on Google, you get access to more resources and tools to bring your ideas to life.
Recap of the hackathon season
To help students get started with Google Cloud Platform, hackathon attendees received Cloud Credits that let them use the assortment of GCP products and APIs to prototype for free. And what differentiates these credits from the GCP free trial is that they don’t require a credit card, a great offering for student populations who may not have one or may be hesitant to provide one for fear of billing snafus.
Additionally, a Best Use of Google Cloud Platform prize is awarded at every hackathon, where each person on the winning team received a Google Home Mini.
The project I Know Trash won the Best Use of Google Cloud Platform prize at DragonHacks, the annual hackathon at Drexel University. It uses the Google Cloud Vision API on a Raspberry Pi to identify the item you’re holding and places it either in the garbage or recycling segments of the trash can. This can allow recycling to be done more efficiently.
Another project, Bus Buddy, won the prize at Cypher, the annual hackathon at William & Mary college. It is an Action for the Google Assistant that provides transit information for the university’s bussing system. You can ask a question like, “When’s the Purple Line coming?” or “When will the Northline arrive at Barracks?” and get quick, immediate answers.
We also provided Google Homes for MLH’s hardware lab, a service that allows attendees to try out some hardware during the event without having to buy it themselves. This makes these services more accessible to a wider audience and allows projects to be innovative without worrying about costs. Hundreds of Google Homes have been checked out during the past year’s hackathon seasons.
Many interesting Actions were created to solve novel challenges. One of them, Doctor Smart Tap, allows one to use voice commands to dispense a precise measurement of liquid. This could be useful in lab environments where you may not want to handle liquids directly.
To learn more about Doctor Smart Tap, you can watch the demo in the video above.
Other Actions, like SickoCode, were more humorous. It uses machine learning to generate rap lyrics in the style of a specific artist.
MLH Localhost
In addition, we worked together to create a Localhost Workshop. MLH Localhost is a program that provides workshops to student groups as content bundles that give them everything they need to host the workshop themselves, teaching the rest of the group on a given topic.
Our workshop, Ok Google, How Do I Build Actions for Assistant, walks students through building an Action that is able to perform sentiment analysis on a given topic by reading recent tweets on that subject. The guide introduces them to Dialogflow and the Cloud Natural Language API to provide a positivity score.
This has been one of the more popular workshops, being run in over 25 workshops from student groups around the world, in places like Parul University and the University of British Columbia.
Conclusion
The Fall 2019 hackathon season begins August 23rd. We can’t wait to see what is built at the next hackathons, and we’ll continue to ensure that you get the resources you need to get started.
Want more? Head over to the Actions on Google Reddit community to discuss Actions with other developers. You can also join the Actions on Google developer community program and you could earn a $200 monthly Google Cloud credit when you publish your first Action.
