COVID-19 Bot Tracker

Tell me about Nicaragua
What about Italy
Totals
Change the language to Spanish

Inspiration

A lot of news sources like CCN, BBC are reporting daily about the current active, recovered and deaths cases around the world. It's a very awful number that is growing each day. In my opinion, one of the most trustworthy websites that is keeping track of this type of statistics is the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center website. It has a complete overview of the world and every country about how they are doing.

In order to keep simplicity and given the fact that users around the world could be more interested in their own country, I decided to create a chatbot that could be easily accesible, and could filter with ease each country's statistics.

What it does

The prototype is in the Twilio Sandbox, that means, that it uses a fixed phone number that is connected to WhatsApp. Once registered, the user can ask the bot about a specific country, and the total numbers around the world.

How I built it

The bot is connected to WhatsApp which leverages the Twilio Autopilot capabilities for Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify actions (intents) and utterances. This information is then sent to an API Gateway endpoint in Amazon Web Services.

This API Gateway connects to Node.js Lambda function where my code is hosted. The voice app is written in Node.js using the Jovo Framework, a multi-platform framework that developers can use to create Alexa skills, Google Actions, Twilio Autopilot and Slack bots, and many other type of bots.

Challenges I ran into

Twilio Autopilot. I've been working with voice technologies for 5 years, specifically Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. The challenge for this hackaton was to learn and master the basic about Twilio Autopilot + WhatsApp Integration.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I was able to build a WhatsApp bot using Twilio. In my opinion this is the channel that can reach easily millions and millions of people around the world.

What I learned

I learned to create a WhatsApp bot with Twilio Autopilot. This is another conversational platform that I'm adding to my skills thanks to this hackaton.

What's next for COVID-19 Tracker

I'd like to collaborate with the Johns Hopkins University to add this bot to one of their official channels, and help them spread awareness about the awesome job they're doing.

To test this bot, you need to save the contact number of the WhatsApp bot: +1 415-523-8886

And send the message: join weak-guard

You can also follow this link: https://wa.me/14155238886/?text=join%20weak-guard