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Title: Improving Online Shopping Experience with Digital Voice Assistants
Mentor : Dr. Sabirat Rubya

Summary: In 2020, there were a total of 256 million digital buyers in the United States. Use of voice assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa, Siri, etc.) has also been rising rapidly: there are over 110 million virtual assistant users in the United States, and the software is especially common in smartphones and smart speakers. However, existing voice assistants are not very effective in assisting users in online shopping, particularly when users want to hear about product reviews to make an informed decision. This project will explore the opportunities of using digital voice assistants for online shopping. Through the project, the students will learn how to extract online user reviews from Amazon.com. They will develop a voice assistant using existing tools and apply data mining and natural language processing techniques to answer user queries related to products and reviews.  They may also have the opportunity to conduct user studies to understand the acceptability and usefulness of the assistant by the online shoppers.

Required Skills:
•	Experience in Python programming language

Preferred Skills (not required):

•	Interest in developing voice assistants 

•	Familiarity with data mining and Natural Language Processing techniques