Silicon Halton Member Creates Ask Oakville Alexa App

Updated:  July 13/18 | By:  Chris Herbert

Brett Gillett, Chief Orbiter, at Curious Orbit attended Silicon Halton and the Town of Oakville’s meetup on Smart Cities last month. Brett has been supporting smart city initiatives over the past years and he continues to do so with the announcement of his “Ask Oakville Alexa App”.  Brett offers a newsletter that you can subscribe to here.

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Hi Chris,

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend a Smart Cities meet up co-sponsored by the Town of Oakville and Silicon Halton.  It was interesting to have a chance to hear many different perspectives on what precisely a Smart City is.  Many people spoke at the event including town employees and consultants, as well as from Silicon Halton members.

After the formal part of the meeting had concluded I had the opportunity to chat with a few different folks about Smart Cities in general and in particular Open Data.  We talked about how in some cases there still seems to be a  lack of openness or in certain situations datasets which used to be publicly available are removed when the interests of those who are responsible for publishing and maintaining the data sets shift – or the technology responsible for storing the data makes it more difficult to publish.

I left the meeting energized and with a rediscovered sense that while Smart Cities are inevitable, the real value will come when the data collected is provided to citizens in a form they want, when they want it, and in ways that are easily consumable.

With the idea of making data accessible to consumers, I left the meeting with an idea for an Alexa app.  Over the last week, I’ve built a simple prototype Alexa app, called ‘Ask Oakville.’  Right now, you’re able to get information about your Oakville councilor, when the next town council meeting is scheduled and when should you put out your recycling, green bin or garbage.

Currently, I’ve added data manually from many sources – the town website (councillors and meetings) and the physically printed waste collection calendar, but I’m hoping in the future for some new data sets to be published so the application can be more easily maintained.

Here’s a simple overview of how I built the ‘Ask Oakville’ Alexa application.

(Graphic by Brett Gillett, Curious Orbit)

Until next week – get out there and build cool things,

Brett

— Chief Orbiter

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Related links:

• How to be Smart(er) in Mid-Sized Cities in Ontario
• What Makes a Smart Town?
• Silicon Halton’s TU20 Cup Smart Cities Winner Reflects on the Contest
• My scores for this year’s Smart City TU20 Cup contestants
• TU20 Cup