InvestiChat

Inspiration

Based on current events and the increasing education disparity, many presumptions have been made about those who are not eloquently versed–assumptions about their character, morality, race, religion, ethnicity, etc. We wanted to create something that could bring attention to this through a murder mystery game.

What it does

Through an interactive Facebook chat bot, users are able to solve a murder mystery by conversing with suspects. Using the choice of suspect, results are updated on a graph to create a representative figure of the data. For now, the graph that is displayed is static for representative purposes until the actual site can be completed.

How I built it

We created a Facebook chatbot using Heroku, virtual environments, and Flask. We edited that chatbot in Python, accounting for conditions through continuous testing. We then pipelined the data through Flask, to html, to JS, and then finally back to html.

Challenges I ran into

The first major challenge was setting up a chatbot that had a mutable response behavior. Next, we had to account for as many cases of messages as possible. Finally, communicating the final data to an external website proved to be very complicated.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of our chatbot, which is robust, and communicates the storyline in the way that we desire. Additionally, we are proud of how our website updates with new responses and displays the accumulated data from Facebook representatively.

What I learned

I learned how to create a functional Facebook chatbot and edit its response behavior. Additionally, I learned how to communicate data from this interface through Flask, html, and JS to a website that stores the data in a chart.

What's next for InvestiChat

We hope to receive approval from Facebook within a few business days so that anyone can message the chatbot. As of now, only accepted testers are able to interact with the facebook bot. In the future, we hope to increase testing and development, improving the chatbot’s intelligence. We also want to create more interactive games with more than one chatbot per chatroom, all the while,promoting the mission of our organization.

Built With

• facebook
• facebook-chat
• flask
• heroku
• javascript
• jinja
• messenger
• microsoft-api
• python