Food Hitcher Bot

Have you ever wanted to order food delivery but have no friends who live nearby to share to delivery cost with? No worries, we are here to help you find people nearby to order food together with!

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Inspiration

Inspired by our daily struggles of being too lazy to go out to buy food, having no friends to order with us and being too broke to afford the delivery fees of ordering delivery by ourselves, we came up with the idea of gathering like-minded people who live in close proximity to make orders together and share the delivery cost using a quick and easy Telegram bot.

What it does

This bot helps you do two main tasks:

  1. Create an order. For example, if you want to order from McDonald's, you can create an order and input details such as location to deliver to, number of people you want to order with and when you want the food to be ordered by. Once you create your order, people within close proximity of you can see your order and join your order if they are interested.

  2. Join an order. You can see a list of orders that are initiated by others, sorted from the locations closest to you. If you are interested, you can join their orders! Save yourself from a big hassle since there will be people ordering for you and you get to pay much lower delivery fees since it's shared!

How we built it

We started building the Telegram bot from the help of https://towardsdatascience.com/i-built-a-telegram-bot-to-combat-food-wastage-heres-how-293259a1bd32.

We also made use of helpful libraries, such python-telegram-bot, geopy, googlemaps, sqlite3, etc.

Challenges we ran into

We are not very used to using the Telegram API; as a result, we faced some challenges in implementing our features and maintaining the flow of the chatbot as intended.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite our shortcomings, we managed to produce a working prototype that has the basic functionalities we wanted. We also learned a lot about SQL database and Telegram bot in just a short time working together on this project.

What we learned

How to build a Telegram bot. How to work with and manage a SQL database with sqlite3. How to work effectively together as a team. Debugging. Lots of debugging :)

What's next for Food Hitcher Bot

  • Include an interactive map API.
  • Include pop-up notifications for events such as order cancellation, order submission and order arrival for everyone in the order.
  • Auto-create a mini group chat with everyone in the order to allow everyone to easily communicate with each other.

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