Kindergarten Bot

Stay connected with you day care center

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Inspiration

I have two small kids and occasionally I ran late, forget to check in or check out kids. All those operations can be done via SMS (it is the most comfortable way)

What it does

Kindergarten Chat Bot allows you to:

  • tell that you are late to drop the kid
  • check in or check out
  • tell that you are late to pick up the kid
  • enrol into a waiting list
  • tell that your child has different food requirements today
  • tell that you kid will no be attending the day care center for a few days.

How I built it

Firstly, I scripted the scenarios I want to cover. Secondly, I added welcome and thank scenarios. Then, I took Amazon Lex and developed 9 intents to cover my scenario. Used Amazon Lambda to fulfil my intents, as well as, validate input in a few places. Afterwards, I registered with Twilio and it just worked! SMS bots are rocking!!

Challenges I ran into

Yes, I ran into quite a few challenges:

  • The UI did more me a few strange things by replacing a parameter/slot twice, so all my sample utterances became invalid
  • I cannot use numbers in the sample utterances and a few other characters
  • Amazon LEX does not extract more samples from my ~ 10 samples I provided. I had to stay close to the input. I will need to run the bot, analyse and re-train it.
  • I had to do everything with lambda functions. Would be nice if I can just write a sample reply in the UI.
  • Pretty unclear how to combine validation, partial validation and fulfilment with a dialog. (in my video when I provide some bigger instructions I need to insert a question with a confirmation to trigger the bot to continue)

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I managed to make and deploy a bot in just 4 hours (end to end).

What I learned

  • How to program for Amazon LEX (event structures and validation/fulfilment workflow).
  • Connect LEX with Twilio (before I used Slack)

What's next for Kindergarten Bot

  • Find a kindergarten software provider and connect it to they platform.

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