Hello and welcome to our team! Kevin, Gricelle, and Rogelio makes up the engineering team that brought Chip to life, your personal Motivational Companion.
Inspiration
Our inspiration for developing Chip, the animated messaging bot was due to the dramatic high rise of suicidal rate as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, students have had to abruptly transition to synchronized online learning. This has become a time of confusion and unsteadiness for everyone, and as students, we can relate to other students who miss interacting with their friends and fellow classmates, many feel loneliness and hopelessness as well. This bot is intended to provide comforting messages to students daily. Thanks to the Courier API service, we thought what better idea than to support other students like us.
What it does:
Through the API services provided by Courier we were able to develop an SMS scheme that allows us to reach out to students from schools, sending them emails inviting them to fill out a Google form if they are interested in receiving motivational quotes. Through the API services we were able to also send motivational quote text messages to these students.
How we built it
Initially we began by becoming acquainted with the Couriers REST API based system from developers to developers and configured it with twilio and SendGrid, with the help of these two services we soon began sending initial text messages and emails. We created a channel for sending mass email notifications which came with a Google Forms attached. Students interested in receiving messages from Chip, the motivational companion, easily can fill out this form. We then wrote a python script that gets the names and phone numbers of everyone on the Response.csv and puts them in a txt file. Having the names and phone numbers listed helped us create four SMS channels that use this data to send inspirational quotes. Once again, we wrote a python script including the txt file containing the names and phone numbers, we are able to send personalized quotes to multiple students at the same time, as well as sending quotes at different times. Python was the main language we used for this project; the team had some knowledge about it but after this project we are confident on the new skills we got.
Challenges we ran into
As beginner developers we ran into a few challenges, at first, we were novel at setting up the SMS integration system with twilio and SendGrid. We couldn't get the messages to send when we would move the generated python script by Courier to a .py file in our computer. This was solved by overriding the event name which is the Notification ID for every channel and changing the recipient number for each channel. Next, we had trouble retrieving information from an Excel sheet, hence, we decided to use the csv instead due to our time limitations. Once we were able to send messages to individuals at different times, we also wished to send mass messages simultaneously. To do this we had to add some lines to our python script that would iterate through the txt file with the names and phone numbers, it would then assign each name to the correct number. The setup for the email integration was very straightforward, however, we wanted it to let us use a personalized email we created for Chip, we couldn't achieve this so we went with one of our teammates email.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of the project we came up with during this exciting weekend. As first time Shellhackers, and first time ever at a Hackathon, we didn't know what to expect but the documentation available to us online through UPE. Thanks to Shellhacks and the Sponsors, we were able to see Chip come to life. As a team, we feel accomplished for stepping out of our comfort zone and giving the best of our abilities. We are proud to have used our skills to be able to develop an API inspired program used for delivering kind personal messages that may help a student like us who may be going through hardship times. We are also very proud of challenging ourselves to using google doc form and send mass emails intended as if we partnered with a school or organization, this way it would be easier to send mass emails to multiple people and having made it personalized to everyone receiving them.
What we learned
We learned how to implement the Courier API system with our code and add notifications to it. This API made it very easy for us to add that functionality to our code and be able to combine many things into our project, such as sending a google form through the SendGrid integration system, getting the names and numbers from that file and adding them to a txt file that is used by the twilio SMS system to reach out to multiple people! Overall, we familiarize ourselves with the Courier API, twilio, and SendGrid, as well as working with new things we hadn't before with Python.
What's next for Chip - Motivational Companion Bot
The next step for Chip Motivational Companion API would be to add a receive messages functionality. So far, it can only distinguish messages for opting-in and opting-out, but the team wants to give Chip the ability to connect with the users that reach out to him in a more personal level. In the meantime, we added the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline phone number and chat link in case someone needs to talk with a person right away. Once we get Chip to be able to receive messages, we would like to create a script that sends the messages automatically once or twice a day, during more precise times like 8am and 9pm.
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