LifeText

Inspiration

Our original inspiration for LifeText was Kevin being at his cabin with no data but enough service to text. He wanted to check the weather for the day, but wasn't able to. This inspired us to create LifeText and to add more functionality.

What it does

LifeText acts like an API hub where you are able to text in a key word("weather") and required information(location) and it will look up the information and send it back to you in a text. LifeText is able to do many different things for you like lookup weather, search wikipedia, and give you the top 5 headlines from your favorite news source. What we think is the most important function of LifeText is the help function. When you sign up for LifeText you are able to input 3 different friends numbers to contact in case of an emergency. So if you are in the woods but don't have a lot of time, you are able to text "help" to LifeText and it will contact the numbers you gave us and let them know you need help.

How we built it

We first created a flask app with docker to process all of our requests and to run the APIs we are using. This also is the backend of our website that we use for people to sign up and add their emergency contacts. We have the Twillio request in our main file that based off that request call, calls our different apps and functions to process the request and returns the desired data. If the user requests "help" the main function looks up the user's username and finds their emergency contacts. We then send a text to each of them stating that the user needs help and their location, if given.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of problems with setting up flask and that caused a major challenge for us. We weren't entirely sure how to set up flask properly with databases and so when we were trying to make mock user accounts to show off LifeText we were unable to. We ended up running out of time so we had to hard-code some things in order to show off our features, but we plan on taking on the task of properly creating databases and getting everything working properly on a later date.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest thing that we are proud of is that we built something that we will actually use when needed. LifeText was made because one of our team members wanted a service similar when they were at their cabin, and since it didn't exist, we made it ourselves.

What we learned

None of us had used any of the API's before so one of the biggest things we learned is how to develop and set up those.
We learned that we should research more than one framework before starting to make our app in order to avoid issues with the framework we are using after everything is almost done. This happened with flask and while we were able to make it work, we may have had less problems if we researched a little more before starting.