HeyTaxi

Experience is live at https://heytaxi.ma

Inspiration

The inspiration for HeyTaxi comes from the good films about artificial intelligence: Spike Jonze’s Her, where the conversation with an Artificial intelligence becomes the user interface it self.

What it does

HeyTaxi is a virtual assistant (named Sarah), with natural language processing which means you can use everyday language for on-demand ride requests; Sarah will matches these requests with vehicles using an heuristic algorithm to determines whether there are any taxis within an acceptable driving time from the pickup location and with adequate seating capacity.

What Sarah can do for you

HeyTaxi uses Facebook Messenger, no App. nothing to download. After the automatique redirection to Facebook Messenger, Sarah will ask few question about your location and destination. You can either tape the address or simply send the coordinates using the "Send location" messenger's feature. After that, Sarah will match users with similar origins and destinations . For female riders, Sarah will march first the female-only ride.

What's next for HeyTaxi

The next phase for HeyTaxi is :

Create an dedicated free Android application for drivers to help them localise futur passengers and to gather real-time vehicle information for location and fuel level. This data can be used to inform an optimal matching strategy, analyse to traffic jam which can play a significant role in fuel and emissions cost.
HeyTaxi doesn't depends on external or payed service for mapping or routing, it's based entirely on free and open source softwares used by major cities like Barcelona, Lyon and other.
HeyTaxi uses own Routing Machine, which can includes roadworks, traffic incident and traffic jam. Therefore this service can become a opendata service for the city and help others transportation services like : Uber, iTaxi and Careem.
HeyTaxi works for now on Facebook Messenger, but can be linked to other platforms, such WhatsApp, Skype, Slack and voice recognition assistance like Amazon Echo.

Beyond the scope of this hackatron, we hope to get the public administration involved for a real public transportation service and for that we are ready to open source the project.