Improving Web Accessibility
Globally, at least 220 Crore people have a near or distance vision impairment. (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/blindness-and-visual-impairment)
Make the journey of discovering and ordering a product even more accessible through completely voice-based interaction.
According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, 2/3 of e-commerce transactions are abandoned by visually impaired people because of a lack of accessibility. (https://cielo24.com/2023/02/12-accessibility-statistics-you-need-to-know/)
Build an extension for Shopify sellers that allows them to enable a completely voice-based e-commerce journey just by integrating the extension.
Shopify is a popular e-commerce platform used by 1.75 million sellers. (https://backlinko.com/shopify-stores)
Build an SDK that can be integrated with any e-commerce for enabling completely voice-based interaction
User Input -> Voice to Text (Browser Speech APIs) -> Intent Classification (ChatGPT 3.5) -> Interact with Shopify's API and get data -> Text to Voice (Browser Speech APIs)
We didn't have anyone who is a frontend developer on our team which made building the frontend for us slight a challenge. But with a bit of struggle, we were able to build a presentable prototype (We don't like it yet though, we still have to improve a lot).
Although we got an interesting idea, no one from our team is actually versed in Shopify Extension Development, so we weren't able to convert our app to an extension. Although, we are confident we will be able to achieve it in future.
It was the first time for us using GCP, so it was slightly hard to get a VM up and running and start our frontend app on VM and connect it to the domain. Although, following docs step by step made it easier for us and we were finally able to deploy it on GCP.
Tracks Applied (1)
Discussion