Mitra - Your Friend in Crisis

Our idea focuses on bringing all important aspects of rescue, emergency and inaccessible information into a Chatbot, not to forget anyone tired can feel refreshed with our perfectly curated playlists.

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Our Inspiration

  • The current lockdown situation as well as the last year's floods in our region questioned us, *"How can one get help in such Emergency situations?" *
  • The last year's floods here moved thousands of people and few people even lost their lives. But, the most important part is that: People from small villages couldn't get help easily be it in terms of food, shelter, healthcare or anything else. Similar, situation arose during this COVID pandemic.
  • So this time we thought of finding a solution to it, how help can reach even the remotest of remote and poorest of poor.
  • After a lot of brainstorming developing a chatbot was found to be the most feasible solution. Using this chatbot we tend to provide all kinds of emergency services. Our chatbot would be like a friend in urgent crisis.

Hence, MITRA (marathi word for friend) was born !!

What it does

Emergency situations don't come announced hence it is essential to have necessary information handy at times. Mitra our bot helps to address this matter.

*Mitra does the following tasks: *

  • Provide COVID symptoms and precautions.
  • Provide statistics of COVID cases for all states of INDIA and all cities of Maharashtra.
  • Provide a list of NGOs/ Hospitals/ Shelters/ Ambulance locations for Sangli, Kolhapur, Pune, Solapur and Satara. We confined ourselves to these cities as they fall in our neighby regions and within the limited timespan we wanted to create something a lot effective rather than creating something of less impact but large scale.
  • Provide all the required emergency helpline numbers.
  • Suggest light and easy YOGA exercises for mental peace and health. (Credita: Isha Foundation).
  • Suggest curated playlists of soothing music for better relaxation. (Source: Spotify Music).

How I built it

  • Used Facebook's Messenger as interface.
  • To extract required intents and entities used Facebook's Wit.ai NLP platform.
  • To get COVID statistics used IndiaCOVID API.
  • Additionally, developed a Website which provided complete info about our bot 'Mitra'.
  • Used Messenger plugin in website to directly interact with chatbot.
  • Response generator which generates user responses based on intents and entities identified as well as the website is based on Flask backend.
  • Both the flask apps are deployed on Heroku cloud.

*System Diagram of Mitra: * System Design

Challenges I ran into

  • Creating accurate intents and entities necessary for smooth conversation.
  • Developing the necessary information based on identified entities which included extracting necessary information from excel files (pandas manipulation) and representation on chatbot.
  • Writing proper script to parse humongous information given COVID-19 India API.
  • Integrating all together with flask backed and cloud deployment.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Satisfied with the amount of code and analysis we could do in a week.
  • Overcoming each and every error or hidden bug we found.
  • Created an end-to-end project pipeline.
  • Learned a lot of things from shelter heads while data gathering about how the poor live their condition and struggle. (Not an accomplishment but surely an eye opener!!)

What we learned

  • First and foremost, a proper analysis and on paper design always helps and eliminates most of the bugs instead of coding directly. This is the new habit we have learned during the project.
  • Code documentation and commenting habits.
  • Learned basic NLP along the way like intents,entities, tokenization, bag of words, etc
  • Learned about APIs, webhooks and integration.
  • Learned hosting webapps.
  • Finally learned a variety of facebook products which I was completely unaware like Wit.ai (an excellent NLP product after the new refreshment) and Messenger API.

What's next for Mitra - Your Friend in Crisis

  • Can surely add Speech recognition and speech interfacing which can be then used by next level AI assistants like Alexa and Google assistant.
  • Plan to extend helplines of NGOs, food shelters and hospitals for all the cities.
  • Integrate some location API which will make responses to location queries easier. (like google maps search)
  • Extend the COVID API to get statistics of all cities (at least major cities) of India.
  • Provide personalized mood based proper music and Yoga playlists integrated in the chatbot so that they don't have to hover to some other app or webpage.

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