- Published on
Winner of Crowd Favorite Award in Google Actions Developer Challenge 2017
- Authors
- Name
- Dhiraj Das
Introduction
It was sometime in May 2017 when Google had launched Google Assistant, a conversational assistant that allowed Android users to automate everydays tasks by talking to it. As a technology enthusiast and an iOS developer, I was conviced this technology had a lot of potential and wanted to fully explore this technology.
Launch of Google Actions Developer Challenge 2017
Google had announced a hackathon - Google Assistant Developer Challenge 2017 to encourage developers across the world to build custom apps (actions) for the Google Assistant. With eligible participants entering to win $10,000 in prizes including a paid trip to Google I/O 2018, this sounded too good to be true.
Children's developmental milestones
A friend of mine, Yasin, whom I had met during my college days shared a common interest in solving different problems by using technology.
As such, he was the go-to person for me to discuss about this challenge. Yasin shared with me, his experiences with many of his patients who were first time parents and would often had to travel 300-400kms to confirm whether their child is growing well and achieving the developmental milestones associated with their child's age.
We were discussing the plight of these parents and came up with this unique idea to develop an action on Google Assistant that would enable parents to check their children's developmental milestones. This would serve as a screening tool and enable these parents to quickly check different aspects of their child's developmental journey at the comfort of their home.
Developing Babysteps
The following months were full of challenges and dissapointments. As a new technology, there was very limited support available on the internet for developing an action. To make things more challenging, although I was well versed with other programming languages, such as Swift and Java, Javascript was completely new to me. This, coupled with the task of creating a serverless cloud function made the development all the more challenging.
There were times when there was no support available on StackOverflow and our only support would come from the google assistant support email which used to respond to our queries and provide the support to us whenever we were stuck.
After months of development and revisions, we were able to submit our app, and get it approved by the Google Assistant team for publishing it publicly. We recieved a decent MAU of around 500-1k users after our initial launch.
Winner Announcements!
Yes, we won the Crowd Favorite award in the Google Actions Developer Challenge with a prize money of $5000!