Inspiration
The inspiration for our group's project stemmed from a period of time in which some of the members were sick for over a week and believed they had gotten COVID. However, this was not the case. Looking back after that event I realized that what had the highest toll on my physical condition was most likely my mental state. I was so worried about having COVID that it was hard to relax. Additionally, the mental stress started to take its toll on me. Fortunately, I did not have COVID but I now understand that others may not be as fortunate and may be going through the same thing I went through. This led to the idea of creating a system that can help calm down users who have worries about contracting COVID.
What it does
Our bot provides an automated response to the questions users may have about their symptoms and how they relate to COVID in order to relieve the stress of users that may not be able to go to a doctor but are still worried they may have COVID. This will be done by the bot offering the user potential remedies/medicines and giving them a list of potential viruses their symptoms could indicate other than COVID.
How we built it
The majority of the program was done using Python and it was integrated with WhatsApp through Twilio. We used numerous APIs and development applications, such as flask and ngrok, to create the bot that we have.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge that we had was integrating Twilio with WhatsApp was difficult as none of us had prior experience with this. By using the mentors in the discord and outside sources, we were able to get the integration done and start the coding for the project. Another challenge we had was the integration of Google Cloud into the design. This had completely stumped us as we had no experience working with the cloud. We ended up ditching this idea as none of us were able to come up with a way to use Google Cloud.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Some of the accomplishments we're proud of are being able to make the bot send a response, getting the bot working, and being able to code the bot with not much prior knowledge.
What we learned
We learned a lot of new things from this project. We furthered our knowledge of the python coding language and learned some basics on how to use the command prompt. We also learned how to create a virtual environment through command prompt and learned what that meant. Additionally, we learned how to set up different responses for when someone messages the bot.
What's next for Team #22 Fredly
The next step for Fredly is to make the bot able to produce responses that are more specific and improve upon Fredly to make it more effective. Additionally, Fredly could potentially become an app of its own in the future.
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