Eclectic Economics

Inspiration

98.7% of people in developing countries have access to mobile line subscriptions (United Nations). However, most of these are not smartphones. In nations with low or medium-level economies, there are more people with access to mobile devices than to water or electricity (World Bank). We sought to make information more accessible to the people that need it the most.

What it does

Our program takes prompts given through text, analyzes them with Twilio, and then returns what they asked for. For example, if they ask for the weather where they are, we return the temperature and relevant things they should know. If they send us a picture and ask us to determine what it is, we use google cloud image processing and give back what the image is of as well as labels on the image.

How we built it

We created a pipeline using Twilio's Programmable Messages which was then sent to a serverless Lambda instance on AWS that routed the commands to the proper APIs which was artisan made by our expert hackers. These APIs utilized GCP Vision, Community-Based Open Weather, and another API written by-hand that's hosted on DigitalOcean.

Challenges we ran into

APIs weren't exactly helpful at all times not only when querying them but also when reading documentation and the likes. Although we ran into these issues, we didn't let the slow us down but instead make us look elsewhere to achieve our goals.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made it through and finished our program, with all the functions attached.

What we learned

Pushing forward even when we don't know what's going to happen. Not being afraid of the unknown is imperative.

What's next for Eclectic Electricity

Adding Bank Account Management, health alerts, and possibly traffic updates. SMS and MMS is a vastly underrated lane of information distribution due to it's widespread reach (when comparing 30Hz to 4GHz).

Although draconian in approach, we find that SMS can be used as a force for good instead of incessant telemarketing campaigns. The reach, reliability, and usage in rural and under-developed area trumps 5GHz and beyond forever more.