DIY Project Manager via Facebook Messenger chatbot

Inspiration

Home Depot, one of the largest home improvement companies around, is making progressive changes in the way they run their business in an attempt to attract more customers. In recent years, Home Depot has been brainstorming ways to appeal more to millennials. In doing so, they are creating more online tutorials and how-to videos. We wanted to go one step further by introducing a DIY virtual assistant making it easier for customers to start a new project.

What it does

The bot communicates with users in order to develop a DIY project plan. Specifically focusing on what tools and materials the user will need.

How we built it

We took a bot kit base and integrated it with facebook messenger web hooks. Then, we added a LUIS.ai middleware for NLP related tasks.

Note: We were unable to deploy our bot in time. We tested and ran using localhost.

Challenges we ran into

• Learning node.js and asynchronous programming
• Integrating LUIS.ai into bot kit
• Integrating bot kit with facebook messenger web hooks.
• Understanding the NLP model of intents and entities

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Trained a deep neural network for natural language processing!
• Created a chatbot that works on Facebook Messenger!

What we learned

• How to use botkit to create an interactive Facebook Messenger bot
• How to use LUIS.ai to train a NLP model

What's next for DIY Project Manager via Facebook Messenger chatbot

• Deploy our bot using Heroku
• Add an image classifier via Clarifai so that an end user can upload an image of a project and get automatic assistance.

Built With

• botkit
• luis.ai
• node.js