botUMBC

Library Location
weekend
Library
Call
Book lunch
Menu
Joke
Call

Inspiration

As international students applying to a University in the USA, getting information on the university through some google searches wasn't enough. Having the ability to know information on a personal level with someone going that university would help a lot, but it's hard to get such contacts or tedious to obtain access to any such network if it exists.

And even after you get here, getting to know about the things you need along with handling the culture shock might be overwhelming. Having the ability to ask someone anything and everything you can do at a University or get help to ask the right person helps a lot.

The ideation for this bot came as a solution to this problem!

What it does

This is a chat-bot that acts as an information guide to all services and activities in your University (In our case UMBC!).

Some of the many functions it can do:

Ask for the menu at True Grits.
Ask for directions to any place on campus.
Get to know different people to contact.
Call, message a UMBC student.
Book on-campus food.
UMBC transit timings.

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Understanding webrtc and getting it to work.
Rendering our android app's UI.
Wrapping our heads around the implementation of NLP in the project.
Handling all the quirky and weird ways a person might interact with the bot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting a working app on our phones!
Being able to make a video call among ourselves!
The navigation feature.
Making our bot be capable of making lame dad jokes :P!

What we learned

A lot of NLP concepts and their implementation.
Developing an android app.
Using docker.
Using cloud services and writing APIs.

What's next for botUMBC

There's a lot of scope for this, but we were restricted by the availability of different APIs to retrieve information from UMBC. For example, we find out API's to retrieve event information from myUMBC and the authentication was too much of an overhead to deal with.

Getting access to such other APIs to get more information out of UMBC or any other University would help to build a huge set of features and interoperability among them. Like:

Getting directions to an event.
Buying tickets for a sports event on campus.

Another feature we'd like to see implemented is to create a dashboard based on the questions you interact with the bot and based off that create a personalized FAQ & recommendations. This would add Machine Learning into play to generate those recommendations allowing for possible data visualizations too, which we thought could implement but did not have time for.

Created my free logo at LogoMakr.com