Better Clark Bathroom Bot

BetterClarkBathroomBot will communicate and let you know where to find the bathrooms in Clark's buildings.

Inspirations (What Inspired Us?) In 2021, a petition circulated Clark's campus drawing attention and awareness to the lack of non-gendered restroom facilities on Clark's campus. This alone is a major issue, as Trans and/or Non-Binary, agender, genderfluid, and gender non-conforming folx are either forced to make an uncomfortable choice, or go the extra mile to find a suitable restroom facility, which can mean missing bits of classes.

What it does

We built this Better Clark Bathroom Bot to allow individuals to identify and navigate gender neutral or all inclusive restrooms with ease and privacy. We hope this will provide an easier solution for those who need it, but also being attention to those who may not be aware of such issues.

How we built it

We used an open source NLP called Dialogflow Essentials, which helped us turn natural language and user input into actions, intents, and responses. We were able to compute a number of dialogues, user scenarios, variables that should be recognized in accordance with certain locations and questions, and created certain sequences and responses to be returned.

Challenges we ran into

We faced challenges when it came to actually starting out and finding an open source program that would work with the idea we had in mind. Something else we struggled with was finding ways to implement and simplify our many ideas with the time constraint we had.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have compiled, trained and successfully executed a basic chat bot. This was the first Hackathon for both of us, and we are proud all in all to have finished with a project we put so much work into.

What we learned

We learned a lot about machine learning, training a chatbot and creating a chat bot, and overall learned a lot about putting the concepts and practices we have been learning in classes into an actual project. That was one of the biggest learning curves as well, actually just figuring out what goes where, and what that does in relation to everything else.

What's next for Better Clark Bathroom Bot

If we had more time and resources, Better Clark Bathroom Bot would hopefully not only be able to identify gender neutral restrooms, but provide images as well as descriptions as to if they are wheelchair accessible. We would also love to expand on the resources within accessibility, like providing accessible entrances and exits and alternate routes for when buildings and streets may not be accessible.