Work: Voice User Interface Design
Team members: Paul Aguilar, Antonio Banda, Gaurav Paryani
Time: October 2017

The HackTX 2017 was a 24-hour hackathon held by UT Austin, a branch of Major League Hacking. Since job hunting season was coming, we ideated a product/service to help people practice for interviews by either asking them job position questions gathered from the Internet or customed interview questions. Alexa is an intelligent voice assistant developed by Amazon. Comparing with other interview mockup methods such as in-person or apps, Alexa was handy and could offer human-like sound to make the interview realistic. Therefore, we built a Alexa Interviewer skill to implement our goal. The skill was written in Python with Flask-ask, Zappa. Full script of codes can be found here.

After I talked with many people including UT career advisor, Indeed employees, classmates, and friends about my Alexa Interviewer project, which they all found very interesting and had potential, I decided to restart the project in the summer 2018 and finally publish it in the Alexa Skills Store. The research & design plan would be as follows.

Research & Design plan:
• Make further surveys and interviews to find out how people prepare for and mock up interviews, where do they find interview questions, the advantages and disadvantages of their interview mockup methods/applications, how many people have Alexa related devices, how likely they would use Alexa Interviewer, validate or invalidate the application scenarios in job interviews, college admission interviews, visa application interviews, etc.
• Analyze the research data and competitors to find the product opportunity.
• Test existing ideas: customized interview questions, answer recording and replay, AI feedback of the answers concerning emotion, fluency, etc.
• Iterate the design and user testing process.