FlySafeBot

Inspiration

In this Hackathon, we decided to build a chat bot. Specifically, we decided to build a chat bot that tells you a necessary travel information needed for travel from one place to another. Me and my teammate are both international students and due to pandemic we are always exposed to the travel pandemic hazards. Also since we are attending university over broad, traveling overseas and taking flights that has one or more stops are very common. Every time we want to take one of these flights, we have to check more than 3 or 4 government websites to make sure whether we are safe to travel to those airports, since airports are one of the easiest place to catch Covid-19. This is a great concern for us because not only it impacts our health, it will impact our life such as graduations, University life and much more.

What it does

This bots tells you a necessary details of current covid 19 status. You can tell the bot where you travelling and the bot will calculate how dangerous the travel is, and give you some advice on that. Also you can ask for country specific covid news headlines to keep you updated globally.

How we built it

We used BootBot CLI, which is mainly coded with Javascript (Node.js). We used libraries such as Cheerio to help us with the web scraping and APIs such as NewsAPI for the news updating.

Challenges we ran into

Most of the challenges came from the language and the project itself. It was our first time building a live bot and Javascript was not a familiar language for us compared to languages like Python or C. However, I think we did a moderate job on overcoming those

What's next for FlySafeBot

FlySafeBot has, of course, a lot to improve. Our initial plan was to make the bot tell us which documents we need for the travels we want to take. However, this plan was omitted since there were no straight forward website nor API that would help us achieve this. Maybe if we have later a more time, we could build our own API to return the documents we needed so that we could further improve our bot.

Built With

• bootbot
• cheerio
• javascript
• newsapi
• node.js