Q-manity

Creating jobs by saving time!

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Inspiration

Q-manity (a contraction of Queue and Humanity) was born of an alarming fact. "Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours each year waiting in line." Said Alex Stone in 2012 in his article “Why Waiting Is Torture” in The New York Times. In other countries, in proportion, this number is higher. Generaly for certain services (administrative, restauration, healthcare, concerts ...) human beings are obliged to spend hours in lines. These lost hours represent a huge shortfall for the economies of the countries, and waiting in line is an activity that also everyone hate.

On the other hand there are many people excluded from the system who are out of work and who for a decent pay could provide waiting service in queues, saving valuable time for people (doctor, nurse, engineer, …) whose time has a very high value for the society, even globally the economy of the country.

Exemple of a long queue in Africa

What it does

Q-manity is a Messenger chatbot, with rich webviews allowing you :

  • to find accredited persons willing to wait for you in a lines against a decent pay,
  • to have alerts on the evolution of the queue and come at the right time.

How we built it

We leveraged Facebook Messenger platform to develop Q-manity, the Chatbot was built using

  • Facebook Messenger
  • Facebook Graph API
  • ChatFuel
  • ReactJS
  • CakePHP
  • NLP/NLU

Challenges we ran into

Some of the major challenges we faced were

  • Designing the bot flow
  • Refining the idea
  • Integration of all the component (Backend, FrontEnd & Chatbot)
  • Testing the application
  • Intergrate the advices from mentor before the deadline
  • Meet the deadline

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We were able to include many mentor advices
  • We were able ship a working prototype
  • Quickly form a strong devoted team

What we learned

  • Q-manity have the potential to create jobs
  • Q-manity will improve productivity of workers by reducing the amount of time they spend in queues
  • Q-manity principle can be use in many other domains

We also learn

  • How insert messenger extension in a Chatbot
  • Hot to build a bot quickly
  • How to effectively divide the work

What's next for Q-manity

  • We will beta test the service with selected places and selected Q-person.
  • We will open a company to lead the project
  • We will implement the relevant advice of our mentors
  • may aim at integrating other big communities working towards the same cause in future.
  • We will work harder on the business plan.
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