Inspiration
Every day people spend hours crossing the border from Mexico to the United States, San Ysidro being one of the busiest border crossing in the world, people depend on planning ahead their route so that they can to work on time. The Problem is that most of the platforms that offer the estimated time for border crossing also depend on ads placements and in the case of Facebook or Whatsapp groups there is a lot of unrelated content going around that it takes a lot of time to find the information you are looking for.
What it does
We created a bot that gives you the border crossing time right inside messenger, that way we eliminate the barrier for users of having to download an app, saving them time and memory space, besides its easier for adoption as the user already is interacting with the platform most of his time.
How we built it
Our algorithm automatically search on the internet the different cross-border information and also parse data from Facebook groups twitter and related border source. Also, we implemented some dialog features to make it more user-friendly
Challenges we ran into
The curation of content that we extracted from the other platforms in order to show only the related with waiting times, the ideation of conversational features in order to make it more human like
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Helping people from Mexico and the United States get their border crossing information quickly so that they can organize their time better.
What we learned
How to parse data, use machine learning, conversational dialog flows
What's next for BorderBot
We are going to implement the same algorithm to fetch the crossing border time and the lines in all Canada, US and Mexico border.
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