friendlyBot

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  friendlyBot

Inspiration

Anxiety disorders are the most common of all mental illnesses and experts are seeing a rise in the level of anxiety. This is especially true for teenagers with 25 percent of all teenagers being affected and 15 million adults affected in the United States. In addition to anxiety, 20 percent of teenagers experience depression before reaching adulthood.

We became inspired to confront this issue especially since everyone has experienced a sad time in their life. We feel that everyone should have a good friend that they can go to talk to and have some outlet where they won't be judged. This is why we created friendlyBot.

What it does

It allows users to communicate to a friendly bot, to practice communication skills or to have something to communicate with. The audience for this chatbot can be anyone. It can be used for young children to improve and practice their language and social skills, it can be used by teenagers who simply just want someone to talk to, and it can be used by adults who just want to have an outlet serving as a personal digital journal.

How I built it

I used the Facebook Messenger API and node.js.

Challenges I ran into

Getting authentication and overall project set up. We also ran into a lot of brainstorming indecisions. We had many ambitious project ideas so it was difficult to narrow down just one.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The bot works. (lol) We were able to create a finished product and are proud that the chat bot is able to respond correctly and appropriately to our message calls.

What I learned

How to work with the Facebook Messenger API

What's next for friendlyBot

Improving the performance of the bot, and adding Natural Language Processing. This would allow for really engaging and dynamic conversations that could really help in mental health areas.

Built With

• facebook-messenger-api
• node.js