Inspiration
One of our greatest frustrations is the inability of popular virtual assistants, such as Siri or Google Assistant to answer simple queries, and often simply reverting to a web search. We thought that it might be a good idea to implement a bot specifically for answering these simple queries. Due to the amount of support we'd have from Twilio, seeing as they're sponsoring, we immediately decided to make our bot an SMS bot.
What it does
Nothing too complicated. Send a query, our bot pings Wolfram, you get a response.
How we built it
Originally, we had planned to write our bot in Node.js, but we eventually came to realize that both Twilio and Wolfram have much simpler to use APIs available for Python. Both the Wolfram and Twilio APIs were a delight to use on Python, and, although we were mostly unfamiliar with Python, we managed to figure out the APIs relatively quickly.
Challenges we ran into
We'd spent most of the hackathon working on different ideas, which we all scrapped. The result of this was that we had 6 hours to write a submission on very little sleep. The code itself is dead simple (check out the GitHub if you want to see for yourself) - but we nearly fell asleep on our keyboard multiple times.
What we learned
Always come to a hackathon with an idea in mind (if you couldn't tell yet this was a very last-minute project)
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