CARA | Devpost

Inspiration

Throughout high school and college, I've tutored students in my free time and have noticed that many of them find or incorrect information online. In particular, low-income students often fall prey to sites such as Yahoo! Answers, which provide inaccurate or misleading information. In a world where information is always at our fingertips, this is inexcusable. Students deserve to find relevant and accurate information, and our chat bot will empower them to do so.

What it does

CARA (Curated Academic Resource Assistant) is a friendly chat bot who can provide students with trusted online resources in subjects that range from economic and precalculus to chemistry and Spanish. Students can also get practice exams and quizzes to bolster their education.

How we built it

Students' chat messages are parsed through LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service), an incredibly intelligent Natural Language Machine Learning processor pioneered by Microsoft. We extract each message's intent, deciphering what topic students need help with. Then, these queries are autocorrected by the Bing Autocorrect API and fed through the Bing Web-search API. By narrowing our search to specific websites relevant to the student's query, we return a list of the highest-quality, most relevant web pages to help the student.

Challenges we ran into

Connecting the front end to the back end was very challenging for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using so many technologies in concert to bring together a very tangible project that will definitively help people.

What we learned

We learned a great deal about the various Microsoft APIs we've used in this project, and have had a lot of fun learning about the intricacies of LUIS in particular.

What's next for Cara

First and foremost we plan on deploying our app for immediate impact. Additionally, drawing on our team's linguistic abilities, we've already created a second LUIS parser for Spanish and have translated the training data into Spanish as well. The next step will be to find high-quality resources in Spanish and allow the ability to toggle language on the chat bot itself.