Merry Winter Ho Ho Ho

Winter is not a season, it's a celebration

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Inspiration

Christmas and winter is the time when we can spend time with our family and send gifts to our loved ones. It is hard to calculate the budget for the holiday season and it is also hard to find activities to spend the time when people are free during the holiday.

That is why we created our site "Merry Winter Ho Ho Ho". We have a budget calculator to help people stay on budget for the holiday. We also have services such as sending  messages to Santa for people and children to send their wishes to Santa. Further, we have music playlist as well as listening to music with Santa in Whatsapp service for people to enjoy their holiday time. Further, everyone loves to laugh and feel happy. That is why we have a chat bot that tells jokes about things that are  related to Christmas. Finally, people need to send or receive gifts to/from others during Christmas and our package tracking services with AI can fulfill people's questions about the gifts that they send.

What it does

  • Welcome to Merry Winter Ho Ho Ho. Our mission is to provide a merry Christmas and happy winter experience to everyone. We offer a budget calculator, gift suggestions, sending messages to Santa, music chat with Santa, joke chat bot, and a package tracking service.
  • There is a Christmas music playlist on our site. Please enjoy Christmas music while visiting our site.
  • We  have a Christmas Gift suggestion section for you.
  • You can also calculate your budget using our budget calculator during the holiday season.
  • Further, you can send your messages to Santa and you can listen to music with Santa by sending text messages to our Whatsapp number and typing the certain keywords to listen to music.
  • We have a chatbot that tells Christmas jokes. You just have to type keywords such as Christmas, Dinner, Santa, Jose, Identity to read the jokes that are related to the keywords.
  • Finally, we have a tracking package service. Please type in your phone number and our Artificial Intelligent bot will call you back to tell you info about the tracking of your packages.

How we built it

  • We used Google Directions and Maps Static to get the route paths to Santa's house in Twilio.
  • The Twilio chatbot was developed and connected with WhatsApp. We also used Youtube video for music and Google Map for the direction. We utilized machine learning, AI, and NLP to develop the chatbot.
  • We developed the chat bot that tells funny stories related to Christmas in Google Cloud and the chatbot is hosted in Google Cloud. We used machine learning, AI, and NLP to develop the chatbot.
  • The AI voice package tracking was developed with AI DSL that enabled us to build dialogs and transitions in the conversations smoothly. The conversation is structured orderly with certain conditions being triggered in different nodes and detected by intents. The conversation is transitioned to different routes based on the intents of the humans. AI voice can sort the intents and provide relevant information based on that. We need to create different intentions and macros to train the AI. The most difficult part is to have a good source of phrases or intents to predict how the humans talk or discuss in conversation.
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Javascript
  • Chat bot
  • AI
  • Google Map
  • Github
  • Linode
  • Cockroach DB
  • Godaddy
  • Domain.com

CockroachDB

  • We hosted the messages database in Cockroach DB.
  • We have SQL database for our data in CockroachDB
  • We found it nice to have Cockroach DB as database to store information and query info

Linode

  • We used Linode for website hosting and cloud storage. We used free credit of Linode to build and host our website.
  • We found plenty of documentations about Linode and we discovered that Linode is easy to navigate and is user friendly. Linode staffs are approachable and friendly for questions. We had chance to connect with Linode staffs in the US and it was a nice experience.

Challenges we ran into

  • We had challenges to plan our project on theme and to integrate all components together.
  • There were challenges to develop Twilio chatbot since we have free plan and we are not allowed to develop certain functions with the free plan.
  • It was difficult at first to find ways to integrate Twilio and WhatsApp
  • We had bug errors while developing the AI package tracking voice and we had to spend time to debug and made the conversation work. We also had to go through different documentations to understand the flow and how to develop the conversations. Further, the time constraint for the hackathon is also a factor that makes us feel worried that we could not finish the project on time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We were able to deliver a final products with services that can make visitors of our site happy.
  • Our Twilio chatbot works and reacts to different function calls and suggests music per request.
  • The AI package tracking voice works and functions well. The conversation is natural and the AI reacts correctly to human's questions. We were able to resolve all the errors that we encountered. We also learnt about DSL.

What we learned

  • We learnt to develop AI voice to communicate with customers for package tracking services.
  • We learnt to develop Twilio to send and reply to API request with video and map
  • We learnt to use CockroachDB

What's next for Merry Winter Ho Ho Ho

  • We would like to communicate with visitors from different countries using different languages.
  • We want to enhance both our Twilio and Google Cloud chatbots with more features so that they are more user friendly and can engage users more.

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