Ingobook

Inspiration

In Ingolstadt there are tens of restaurants, Munich has thousands, and NY is home of tens of thousands. You could not visit these many restaurants in a lifetime. That's where Ingobook comes into place. We try to make the restaurant discovery and booking as simple as that.

What it does

Over the voice interface from the Google assistant you can book a free table in a restaurant in Ingolstadt. And that without pick up any device.

How we built it

We iterated through problem-solution fits in the ideation workshop, and arrived at an idea on automating the booking process for events in Ingolstadt and other cities. It's about frequent events like booking a cinema film, restaurant, parking ticket, and others, that are cumbersome, but easy to automate with Google Assistant. We used Google Assistant to get recommendation for restaurants based on some criteria, and to book restaurant tables. More precisely we connected Dialogflow to a Python Flask Webhook, which interacts with a web crawler client script. This script scrapes restaurant information from Opentable and Tripadvisor for the recommendations, and makes the booking via Opentable. It also stores the restaurants information and attributes in a json database for later retrieval.

Challenges we ran into

1. Solve the problem to get the information when the free tables are available and suggest it to the user.
2. Send the booking from the service to the restaurant, complete the booking and send the request.
3. Fit the flow of the single task together to the finished software.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

• We made a working chatbot dialogue with Dialogflow
• We actually booked real restaurant tables with our code, without relying on any API of Opentable or Tripadvisor
• We overcome some hurdles in the scraping using Selenium

What we learned

• Chatbots are useful, but still not straightforward to use.
• It's not easy to scrape unstructured information and have fallbacks in case the data cannot be scraped.

What's next for Ingobook

• Next stop is not only restaurants, but use Ingobook for booking cinema tickets, car or bike repair appointments, or even parking tickets.
• The advantage is that it will automate this simple yet cumbersome process of booking events.
• Extend the recommendation system to be more personal to the user's bookings, e.g. Ingobook can remember what you frequently booked and ask you this on a next booking.

Built With

• beautiful-soup
• dialogflow
• flask
• json
• python
• selenium