COVID-19 Chatbot

Inspiration

Nowadays, with many people getting their news as headlines off of social media, misinformation is a serious problem. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s especially important to be well-informed of health guidelines and regulations to keep yourself and other people safe. While people are encouraged to read government websites and reputable newspapers, with so much information on the web, this can seem like a daunting task. As such, we decided to develop a friendly, easy-to-use chatbot which can answer questions about COVID-19.

What it does

Our chatbot provides all sorts of information about COVID-19, including: what the virus is, symptoms, number of cases in various countries, general health guidelines, how it is transmitted, and more.

Challenges we ran into

Neither of us had any experience in app/web development or with using APIs, so we spent a significant amount of time at the beginning of this hackathon, trying to find out how to use and integrate APIs. We ultimately could not include one feature of our chatbot, a News API, but this is an extension to our project that we can continue to work on :)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first hackathon and coming into it, we had no idea what to expect. Since we are a team of only two students who have just graduated high school, our only experiences were our grade 12 computer science courses. Simply deciding to participate in this hackathon is something that we are proud of - most of the other participants are already adults and have many skills under their belts, including machine learning, front-end developing, and cybersecurity. This was quite daunting, but we signed up nonetheless. We are also extremely proud that we were able to create a working project in only 24 hours. Moreover, this project solves a real-world problem and could help people, which is extremely exciting.

What we learned

Over the course of this hackathon, we got a lot more comfortable using and integrating APIs. We also practiced importing libraries in JavaScript and creating simple html browsers. We were very impressed by the capabilities of IBM Watson – it is definitely something we will be wanting to use again!

What's next for COVID-19 Chatbot

Our next step would to use a News API to allow users to find relevant and accurate news articles about COVID-19. We would then have to implement our Watson Assistant-based chatbot into a web browser.