AA-RON

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Inspiration

Our app came from a desire to not only reduce the transmission of COVID but to improve the in-flight customer experience.

What it does

Some of the features that we have implemented are an integrated chatbot that emulates a personal flight attendant. It takes orders and keywords to do things to reduce contact with real flight attendants, so the customer stays safe and happy. We also have a flight hub where you can be taken to the duty-free store or get information about the menu. Finally, you can also look at where your flight is going through a map API that shows the flight path by using the flight engine API.

How we built it

We used two different API’s to allow our program to function. Flight Engine, offered by American Airlines, provided precise coordinate data to accurately track a plane’s location throughout a flight. It also provided flight number information, used to log in to the program itself and track unique individual flights. The second API used was called Folio, used to provide a map service that can display a user’s location during a flight. Google’s Text-to-Speech API was used to integrate a text-to-speech feature for the chatbot. By integrating such technology, the app supports passengers with hearing disabilities, allowing for a broader and more expansive experience mid-flight. Stores and dining menus from the American Airlines website were used to feed data to passengers about their on-board meals or accommodations that they are able to purchase. Multiple external sources and programs allow for AA-RON to ultimately perform as an American Airlines passenger’s guide to safe and ergonomic traveling.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest issues that we ran into was getting the chat to work. Due to time constraints, we were unable to get an actual real-time chat with a flight attendant to work, so we decided to do a chatbot, which we realized was actually a better option for the customer to get really fast responses and help.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implementing a chatbot! This was a lot harder than we thought so we were really happy when we got text to sound to work through a Google API.

What we learned

We should definitely spend more time thinking out our plan before we begin! We wasted several hours trying to work with flutter but realized this was not a viable solution.

What's next for AA-RON

Hopefully, we can implement an actual chat so that if needed the customer can speak with a flight attendant, we also could implement a mobile app and push it to the app store and google play store. There are a lot more safety features that we can implement to help people curb the transmission of COVID such as, being able to get more optimized meal time so that passengers don't have to take their masks off at the same time as other passengers, or also implement contact tracing through the app. There are a lot more things that we could do, but we're really happy with the way that the app turned out so far!