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A sample dialogue of someone asking to connect with other women
Inspiration
Every day, we see stories on the news of terrible things happening to women in our local and international communities. Especially when we are so detached, it's difficult to know how we can actually help. Bloom changes this and catalyzes the process to help you figure out how you can support and empower women locally and globally with just one text message or command to Alexa. In second, you can learn about a cool women owned business or sign up to volunteer with a local charity with significant implications. Bloom makes something so abstract like "helping women" into something tangible that anyone can do with simple tasks or just listening to someone's story.
What it does
After greeting Bloom, you can give a command and start a dialogue. Bloom will guide you through the rest. You can sign up to volunteer, find mentors in your career with local women in your city, donate to incredible charities using real monetary transactions, and discover interesting facts about powerful and innovative women. While these tasks may seem trivial in comparison to major issues like the gender gap in step, but every little step contributes towards finding a solution
How we built it
We built Bloom as a Lex chat bot using Amazon Web services and connected it to Twiliio, the Nessie API and the Alexa skills kit to make it Alexa capable skill. The bot was scripted using Python.
Challenges we ran into
We didn't know any of the technologies we used before coming so figuring out how it works was difficult. Also, Alexa was very difficult to debug
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we even made a working demo, nonetheless a bot that works via an Alexa and SMS. We can show a full conversation with Alexa and many conversations via SMS.
What we learned
What's next for Bloom
Bloom is a foundation for so much more. There are so many different functionalities that we can build on top of the current bot to add more use cases. For example, we want to add a feature that allows women to share their story and for other women to listen. We also want to make the bot more complex and dynamic in its responses.
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