UK Crime Finder

The past couple of months for London is not easy. Terrorism, Fire... all these things stress people's nerves. I've been to London and a few other other places in UK once. I love the scene I saw, the food I tasted and the culture I experienced. I felt sad for what happened to the country and I was thinking what I can do to help the people out there?

The answer is, maybe I could help people to access safety data from UK Police in a different way, and perhaps an easier way, through Alexa so that people can plan their trip accordingly. The data from UK Police is publicly available and could be accessed in different ways: mobile apps, web report or even just plain csv data. However, wouldn't it be easier if you can simply ask Alexa to tell you the latest crime data happened in a neighborhood, a popular destination or simply around your current location if you live in UK? Thanks UK Police to publish out their crimes data transparently, such that I could leverage my software skills to present it on Alexa, a Alexa Skill named: Crime Finder.

For the sake of time, I decided to start with a simple task: telling people the most critical piece of safety information - the crimes summary for a location in a month (the basic time unit used in the UK Police data ). You can simply ask Alexa: "Find crimes around London Eye" or "crimes near me for last month". Alexa will diligently tell you the crimes stats based on the query you asked, like "There are 327 crimes happened near London Eye in March 2017". If you want, you can ask for a further breakdown of crimes so that you can find which crime, theft or robbery or any type of crime dominant that area.

Of course this skill is not perfect. It's just a basic start to help you identify potential dangerousness when you are in UK. If by any chance this could help people be aware of the data from UK Police, that still encourages me in a tremendous way.

Ultimately, I hope everyone of you could hear this Alexa Skill tell you the crime rate has been declining all the time! :-)

To use this skill, simply ask Alexa to "Open UK Crime Finder" and then provide a location or (date, crime category) for the skill to find the stats. Here are a few things you can ask to use this skill:

(1) Find crimes for a location: "Find crimes near Big Ben";

(2) Find crimes near your device Location: "Find crimes near me";

(3) Find crimes for a location in a specific month: "Find crimes near Big Ben in January 2017";

(4) Find crimes for a location with a specific crime category: "Find crimes near Big Ben for Robbery";

(5) Combine location, date and category together.

If you don't provide a crime category, the skill will give you a basic summary of crime counts for the location you specified and then ask for your confirmation for a breakdown of crimes by category. You can simply confirm or deny the request based on your need.

For technical details, go to my Github repository to check the framework and APIs I have used to finish this work.

The skill has been submitted under name "UK Crime Finder" and is under certification now.