ChoreBot

A chore wheel for the modern student

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Inspiration

For too long, students have suffered in messy rooms with unfinished chores. Our suites, lacking leadership and direction, are unable to organize the completion of chores. Some have tried an antiquated method, the "paper chore wheel." Sadly, this fails due to a lack of pizzazz and SMS abilities.

What it does

ChoreBot harnesses the hottest new technologies in order to solve this age old problem. ChoreBot texts suite members reminders of their chores, and never forgets to rotate the chores at the end of the week. ChoreBot goes above and beyond traditional chore tracking technology, tracking which suite members have completed their chores, and harassing them until completion.

How we built it

We started this journey with a need and a goal: to help students solve their chore accountability problem. We learned we could use Twilio to send SMS messages, and ChoreBot was born. We quickly realized we needed solutions to problems such as how to schedule messages, where to host the messaging code, and how to store the chore data.

We used various Google Cloud Platform solutions to solve these problems. Our final workflow used Google Cloud Scheduler to regularly call functions in Google Cloud Functions, which sends automated texts through the Twilio API. When users respond to these texts, Twilio calls another Google Cloud Function, which accesses the appropriate chore information in Google Cloud BigQuery and responds back to the user.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we had was finding the correct solutions to the aforementioned problems, and then seamlessly meshing the solutions together to result in a simple user experience. Learning how to use BigQuery posed the biggest problem, since no one had prior experience with SQL. Through the wonderful help of the mentors, Google, and our own perseverance, we learned enough to create, read, and modify our database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

30 hours ago none of us had any experience with Twilio or Google Cloud products, and we now have a working project that incorporates all of these technologies together. We are also proud to stand up against chore irresponsibility.

What we learned

We learned the Twilio API, and several Google Cloud Features including BigQuery, Functions, and Scheduler. We became SQL veterans in just 30 hours! We also learned the power of friendship.

What's next for ChoreBot?

ChoreBot has several customers excited for its rollout next week. Our customers include:

  • Mayfield 12
  • Morgan 1004
  • Warren 468

ChoreBot is proud to announce several hot new features, coming soon:

  • Larger suites, more suites, suites with different chores
  • "Poking": finish your chore, unlock the ability to harass the slackers until they get their job done
  • Flexibility: assign multiple chores to the same person, or no chores to a certain person each week

ChoreBot, coming to a campus near you.

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