Scotty Buddy

Inspiration

Today, chatbots are becoming more and more common even in the professional world. They are used to communicate between the user and the product. For example, Poncho on Facebook messenger is a great way to notify its users of the weather. We wanted to design a chatbot to help people stay focused in a world filled with distractions.

What it does

Scotty Buddy helps people to stay on track while working on tasks and rewards hardwork with breaks and high quality memes. When someone accesses a site considered to be a distraction, it brings them back to a tab with a sad Scotty that makes the user get back to working. Finishing an activity awards a dank meme and a 5 minute relaxation period, and this relaxation period will activate every 45 minutes if Scotty believes you were on task (An implementation of the Pomodoro Technique). We hope to extend this to provide even more productivity.

How we built it

We built it using C9 and several languages including HTML, PHP, CSS, Javascript & the jQuery library, and C++ using the Windows API.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble checking which other tabs the user had open. This was solved using C++ to scan running programs, and look for browsers that have blacklisted URLs open.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of just about the whole project. This took a lot of collaboration and we were able to find a project that took just enough complexity to be done in 24 hrs, and still not go over. We really had to figure out what was feasible in a 24 hour period with our limited skill sets. Bettina did an amazing job on the final demo video, showing all of the features in a professional video that was short and to the point. Scotty will be a helpful addition to schools that want to keep their students on track, and college students who need to pace themselves and finish their intense workload.

What we learned

Trevor learned significant video editing skills and vector graphic drawing, Bettina learned a wide variety of technical skills in HTML and web design, and Nicholas learned jQuery and CSS / graphic design skills. The design major learned the most technical skills, and the CS/IS majors learned a wide variety of graphic design techniques, which was a great combination that had us learn so many new and applicable skills.

What's next for Scotty Buddy

We hope to expand this application to more advanced levels of work monitors, and hope to extend Scotty's reach into mobile devices too! Scotty can send notifications if you have big projects due while you're playing games or texting, perhaps even using Machine Learning to detect which activities consume the most time and optimize Scotty's suggestion messages around that.

Built With

• blood
• c++
• css3
• html
• javascript
• php
• sweat
• tears