Axolotl

Inspiration

A lot of us have been attending meetings, especially during this global pandemic. Often, we are not able to make it to these meetings in time due to network issues or prior engagements. As a result, we tend to either miss out on some important points or our colleagues are not able to convey their message to us.

We found a solution to this problem by building a Slack bot, named Axolotl, that would not only schedule meetings according to ease of everyone in the team but also convey the messages to absentees via Slack chat channels so that they are up-to-date with the happenings even if they are facing internet outage or having a dentist appointment.

What it does

We leveraged Slack's slash command to create a poll that will enable members to choose a time slot convenient to them. The meeting will be scheduled at the most-voted time and the link will be shared with the members. The conference will be held on a locally hosted platform so that organizations do not have to worry about privacy.

During the meeting, anyone can use the call-out button and drop in a text to the absent members. Axolotl will mention them in the Slack chat along with the message which was to be conveyed to them.

How we built it

We used the Slack Python SDK along with Redis to keep a track of workspaces, vote counts, and name-user id mappings of members present in a workspace.
We used Azure-Speech service for real-time speech to text conversion for and sending that text to the respective absentee.
We used Spacy to perform named entity recognition for the extracted text and identified names. These names were then mapped to their respective Slack User IDs using data saved in Redis.
We used React and Context (for managing global state) on client side to make a single page application with a good UI.
We used Firebase Real Time Database to store the participants' info and their media status.

Challenges we ran into

Learning about Slack APIs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to make something helpful for the people who attend daily meetings but sometimes miss on something important in the meeting due to their unavailability.