AIMEE

Screenshot from Smartphone

Inspiration

After receiving an e-mail that a few spots opened up for Oakland's DevCircles hackathon the next morning, we suddenly found ourselves building our first chatbot in node.js, express.js, API.ai and meetup's API, an overwhelmingly high number of new technologies. At that hackathon, we asked the jury for feedback, for which they told us that our idea was good, but not specific enough. Taken by a newly fueled enthusiasm for bots, we decided to start working on a new idea the day before the submission deadline. This time we pursued what we were both passionate about: education. Attending an online university that makes you travel seven countries over the course of four years often times makes people skeptical about your life decisions. But we both embrace alternative education, which is why we wanted to work on an educational bot. As we are both TAs for our CS50 class, we regularly encounter students coming to our office hours with the same set of questions and problems. To make that process more accessible and automated for students, we came up with AIMEE, an allusion towards the idea of making AI personal, since Aimee is a French girl name and means “beloved."

What it does

Aimee helps students, in school and beyond, to have easy access to somebody who can help them with coding questions, debugging processes or general learning recommendations without having to leave Facebook or search hundreds of google results. Aimee is built to adjust to your level of expertise but is currently focused on beginning coders. What we encountered ourselves when we started learning to program and still encounter today with our students is that it is confusing for beginning coders to know where to find the right information. We want to make this process a lot simpler and smoother, so the focus can be on the learning itself and not the googling. Aimee also connects its students to the community by giving suggestions on developer meetups in their region of choice, providing a chatroom for its users to connect with a greater student developer community and letting them share tutorials or recommendations with all their friends on Facebook. Beyond coding, our bot is also adept in small talk and can respond with friendly and funny answers as well as super cool GIFs, which means students will never be bored! Since many students already use Facebook, Messenger is the perfect platform for our bot: it gives students a familiar and very user-friendly environment, lets them easily share things with their friends and allows them to access a global community.

In a nutshell, Aimee's Features are:

Guides in the debugging process
Recommends coding resources
Supports all programming languages
Connecting to local Developer Community
Student Developer Community
Is fluent in Small Talk and GIFs

How we built it

Our prototype runs on chatfuel’s integration with Facebook Messenger. On top of that, we connected our bot to Google’s Search API for fetching websites such as MeetUp or YouTube, DialogFlow (API.ai) for Small Talk and Giphy’s API for awesome GIFs. Lastly, we used JSON with heroku for the back-end server.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we faced was the time limit. We had about 24 hours to come up with an idea and build a prototype. But also the fact that we both just came in touch with this area of chatbots made us realize how unbelievably far-reaching the field is and how much we still have to learn. Furthermore, at the local hackathon we struggled to define the problem and our target group, but after reflecting upon the feedback and thinking about our own experience, we found that the student developer community was the one we belong to and help.

What we learned

We learned how awesome chatbots are and the potential of bots to change education for the better. We also learned how to use different APIs with Facebook's messenger platform. And we got into the mindset of failing fast and learning fast while coming up with a myriad of potential ideas. The hackathon was also a tremendous learning experience for us to understand our own community and how we can enhance the experience of users to make learning fun and effective. Overall, it was just a really fun weekend!

What's next for AIMEE

To address scalability, in the future Aimee will be able to:

Provide easy access to documentation without having to search for it on separate websites
Support Multiple Languages (e.g., Chinese, Spanish, German etc.)
Automatically assess code
Store user inputs in a database to personalize experience more for different needs and coding level