Fluffy Finder

Connecting animal rescue groups with their social media followers over messaging applications.

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Inspiration

I LOVE animals, more specifically I adore my cats. Gracie (left) and Lila (right) were both dumped as kittens, and were found roaming the streets. They never got to have what we would call a childhood, and to make matters worse, it's a lot more common for people to prefer kittens when looking for animals.

Gracie (left) and Lila (right)

My girls are my life, and my partner and I are theirs. All they ever wanted was someone to love, and I want other people to have that love in their lives also!

So I made Fluffy Finder

What it does

Fluffy Finder is a Chatbot that makes conversation over messenger services like Slack with people to help them find pets who need new homes.

How I built it

I used a Free developer account for AWS to design and build a Chatbot using Amazon Lex and Lambda

Solution Design

Challenges I ran into

Before starting this challenge I hadn't worked with any form of Language processing frameworks, so It took me some time to get a good understanding of how things worked.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I was extremely excited when I got my find my perfect pet feature working, because It required a bit of fiddling with custom Lex Slot types. When I realised I could add buttons and response cards I got really into learning how I could use them with Slack

What I learned

SO MUCH STUFF! I even applied some basic knowledge while I was making this bot to another one for a Hackathon I enter recently. You can find the code for that one HERE.

I also learnt how to use the AWS cli tools, specifically the one to upload zip's to Lambda:

aws lambda update-function-code --function-name "function-name-here" --zip-file fileb://builds/lambda-build.zip

What's next for Fluffy Finder

I've already made initial contact with PetRescue about maybe adding their database to my bot, as It would help more people in Australian (where I live!)

DynamoDB Integration

I would also like to incorporate DynamoDB and work towards automating the process of informing people when animals they might be interested in become available for Adoption!

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