CUNY Buzz

CUNY Buzz is a Facebook messenger bot that allows you to search for registered campus specific events.

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Inspiration

There are a lot of stereotypes about college students, but from our experience the two that are the most correct are that we like social media and we like food. We tend to like free food even more. On campus there are always some sort of events or meetings going on that not only serve free food but also allow people to connect with other CUNY students. Unfortunately as busy college students we don't always have the time to mark down these events ahead of time. That's where CUNY Buzz comes in, it allows users to almost immediately find out if there is an event currently going on on campus along with other information with the use of Facebook Messenger. Majority of college students have a facebook account, after all facebook was originally a networking site for college students, therefore it is accessible to many people, there is no need to download an app or create an account. In fact you can use Facebook messenger even if you don't have a Facebook account, you simply need to provide your cellphone number.

What it does

CUNY Buzz is a Facebook messenger bot that allows you to search for registered campus specific events. All you have to do is go to our facebook page or type in CUNY Buzz on messenger to engage with the bot. We also have a website for club officers and other authorized persons to submit their event to our database, this database then feeds information to our bot.

How I built it

I followed Facebook's developer docs in creating the initial node.js app. Then I began to research ways on creating a webhook and using heroku. Tanuku and I created the website together and I organized the github page to link it to our own url. Tanuku then created a database using php and made a form on our website for other to fill out.

Challenges I ran into

I had to find a way to train the bot with Brooklyn College related information since we weren't able to use the information we stored in our database.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm extremely happy with managing to build the messenger bot in such a short amount of time, especially when I have never done such a thing.

What I learned

I learned how to build your own local server and then deploy it to a third party host.

What's next for CUNY Buzz

In the upcoming weeks we will be linking up our website database to our app server. This will allow us to include a larger number of events. In the near future we will be deploying CUNY Buzz across multiple campuses.

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