MotiBOT

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  bot demo in groupme

Inspiration

We wanted to have a bot to motivate us in our GroupMe chats, then we wanted to expand this further so that it could also provide conversation topics.

What it does

MotiBot (Known as Shivam in the GroupMe chats) is a bot that searches for keywords from users and is able to respond appropriately to their requests. He can supply motivational quotes at the request of users and also propose roundtable discussions by suggesting topics of discussion that are relevant to our fraternity. He also lists possible talking points that are related to the main topic of the round table discussion. He also says hi :).

How we built it

We made a very simple flask app to accept post requests from a GroupMe bot. In this app we could simply interpret the request and send some message back to the GroupMe chat. MotiBot can be added to more groups, but as of now, this has to be done manually. We are doing the hosting through Heroku, which is used as a callback for the GroupMe bot. We are pulling our motivational quotes and other data from public domain APIs for motivational quotes.

Challenges we ran into

It was a little difficult getting some of the requests to work properly and getting everything set up properly on Heroku. Linking our bot to the Heroku app was the hardest part, but we ended up getting it to work quite well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The response time for the bot is very low at the moment, and the code itself is very easy to expand if we want to add more features in the future. This could very easily be expanded to a helper bot for our fraternity (or other fraternities) to provide useful information when requested.

What we learned

We learned a lot about building a lightweight app with Flask and all of the possible use cases for something like that. Up until this point, we had only used Flask for very simple web design for hackathons and other smaller projects, but we found it to be very useful for something like this. Deployment was also critical to this working properly, so we had to learn quite a bit about Heroku.

What's next for MotiBOT

We will be adding additional capability to easily add this bot to more groups, and expand the text-based functionality of the bot itself. We will probably not have time to do this during the hackathon but hope to continue this project in the future.

Built With

• flask
• heroku
• python