Critter-Bot

search by breed
get random images

Inspiration

All of us adore cats and dogs, either one or the other or both! But none of us can get enough of cat and dog images. We decided to build a bot exclusively to search and request images of cats and dogs, because, why not? It is ideal to be used in any case, whether you want to start a new day with a cute cat or dog pic or you'd like to brighten up if you're having a bad day.

What it does

Critter-Bot is a Telegram bot and users can get started using the /start command. There are currently 3 supported commands -

breed [name] - to search images of dogs by their breed.
random cat - to get random images of cute cats.
random dog - to get random images of cute dogs.

How we built it

We made use of the Telegram API and built the bot in Python. We used GET requests to the API methods to obtain and send images and messages. We used a small dataset with dog breeds and corresponding images. The searching process is done on this dataset to obtain the corresponding image to be sent back to the user. To obtain the random images of cats and dogs, we made use of 2 public APIs.

Challenges we ran into

Using Jina was the main challenge that we had faced. We looked up the docs but still ran into multiple errors and lost a significant amount of our time trying to rectify it. Finally we had to modify our approach so as to obtain the desired functionalities.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're immensely proud that in spite of running into multiple issues, we were still able to complete and submit our project on time. We also take pride in having been able to utilise this time to learn and explore Jina.

What we learned

We mainly learned to use Jina and its components like Document, Executor and Flow.

What's next for Critter-Bot

There is great scope for improvement and vast number of potential features that could be incorporated into Critter-Bot. Image based search and breed identification, cats and dogs FAQ, customized images etc are all in the pipeline.