COVID-19 SMS Chatbot

Inspiration

During the pandemic, many people were overwhelmed by the massive amount of chaotic information flowing on the Internet and the fast-changing government regulations. Therefore, we decided to develop a project that would integrate COVID-19 information and provide easy access to users.

What it does

Our program includes a textbot that would interact with the users and provide them the accurate and up-to-date information. Through SMS, the users are able to retrieve useful and precise information that they are interested in.

How we built it

The chatbot program is built through the MobileMonkey platform. First of all, we collected all the COVID-19 related data and information. Then, we worked on building the artificial chatbot, which would automatically receive users' responses and reply with corresponding information located in our database.

Challenges we ran into

To begin with, self-learning a new interface was challenging for us. It took us a decent amount of time to choose the most effective and cost-friendly (free) application as well as try out different functions and applications of the MobileMonkey platform after we officially settled with it. Then, we had especially most trouble when we wanted to import the COVID-19 CSV data into the chatbot to provide the most up-to-date number of cases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

To solve the above-mentioned challenge, we returned to using an API to fetch JSON data instead of the CSV file that was too large -- an idea we initially abandoned due to MobileMonkey not being able to parse JSON files. This time, since the platform accepts Google Sheets, we decided to turn JSON into a Google Sheet. We had no idea how to do this, but we searched online, ending up with a seemingly simple solution that is said to only take 5 minutes. In the end, we spent 1 hour just doing this because we encountered many other smaller challenges, also looking for solutions online -- we have now learned how to use the ImportJSON(), and we are very proud of it!

What we learned

Apart from the technical new knowledge such as learning how to use a chatbot building platform or converting JSON data into Google Sheet, we are most proud of learning what a hackathon is! Although our final project is very far from true completion, we treasure every moment that made it what it is now: from thinking about our problem statement, researching our target audiences, and brainstorming ideas, to actually building it, encountering problems, and trying to present our ideas! Every second we learned something new, and we are so very glad we joined this hackathon!

What's next for Untitled

Firstly, we need to complete the prompts and paths that will make the chatbot complete. All the COVID-19 information needs to be added inside, too. We would like to overcome all the technical difficulties including not being able to apply to WhatsApp, an app that the largest part of our target audiences (immigrants who cannot easily access data because of lack of community such as individual workers), without money, which is another greatest challenge we encountered when developing. If this texting service chatbot is developed successfully, all people can get integrated health information most conveniently and intuitively. After all, messaging is one of the most used features!