Community Connect Chatbot

Example conversation between a person and the Community Connect Chatbot
Another example

Inspiration

As children growing up in the GTA, out parents strives to give us a active and entertaining childhood. However, as many immigrants from non-English speaking countries can relate to, navigating through all the programs that a community has to offer can be difficult.

What we're Solving

The Toronto Community Centres website is difficult to navigate, involving a complex 10 step search. We were inspired to create this chatbot as a potential function for the City of Toronto to include on their website or Facebook page to allow for easier navigation of activities. This would be beneficial for people who struggle to understand English, as well as for those who are not tech savvy.

What we Used

We used the Azure Bot Service to create the chatbot. The benefits of using the Bot Service include being able to easily implement the chatbot in Facebook or on a website/app, as well as having potential to implement LUIS. Also, to edit the code, we used Visual Studio Code.

Challenges

Some challenges we faced when creating the chatbot was setting up the Azure Bot Service environment. The environment required several other downloads, and we encountered some errors when connecting the Bot Service to the downloaded programs.