Great! IPB Students Create Applications for Blind Users to Online Shopping

Students of the Bogor Agricultural Institute (IPB) are constantly creating and achieving. This time the two students won the 1st Hackathon Champion at the Tokopedia DevCamp 2018 event. This prestigious event was held on August 27-31 2018, at Tokopedia Tower, Jakarta.

They are Saeful Ramadhan and Jodhi Lesmana Putra who managed to bring home the victory trophy. Both are students from the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (FMIPA) IPB Batch 52.

"Actually we registered this competition individually, then Tokopedia made a team consisting of me and Jodhi, who happened to be from IPB, and Frieda Uswatun Hasanah from ITS," Saeful said.

In this competition, the participants were challenged to do the Hackathon, which is making applications in a very short time for 24 hours. Saeful and the team managed to create a voice recognition application. This application is specifically for blind users who want to shop online at Tokopedia. This application has also been successfully simulated on the Tokopedia website.

The way this application works is the system (website) does "question & answer" (Q & A) to the user to collect the desired transaction data. For example, when a user wants to buy credit, the system will ask the user what the nominal amount is, what the card is, and the payment method using voice recognition. After the Q & A process is complete, the system will automate the data filling process until the transaction is completed on the tokopedia website.

According to Saeful, the beginning of getting this idea was because their ideas were previously rejected by the mentor. "We are quite frustrated to find out what ideas are really fresh. One day before the Hackathon began, suddenly one of our friends gave a suggestion to create an online shopping system that could help people with disabilities. Then came the idea to create a system that utilizes voice recognition to shop in Tokopedia," he said.

Both of them claimed to be very happy and did not expect to be the first winner in this race. "This is beyond our expectations. We did not expect our idea to be successfully simulated directly on the Tokopedia website, even though it was only a number of functions," Jodhi said.

Both hope that their application can be further developed and can be implemented into a larger system. "Hopefully when successfully implemented, this application can greatly help blind users who have difficulty shopping online," Jodhi added. (RYS)