Inspiration
We first go the idea of a 411 solution for users with limited internet access on their phones. With the help of text messages, users are able to send command style text which will be analyzed by TripAdvisor and would return short suggestions based on the location input of the user.
What it does
As mentioned, with the use of short command lines such as (Find me pizza near 9999 Address Street In Montreal) send via text message. In return, it would send back the user a stylized text message based on the request. Due to limited characters per text message, the result of the example above would return the name of the top 3 pizza places based on rating along with a location ID. The user can then make a different SMS request by providing the Location ID and would in return get back a SMS with the exact address of the restaurant.
How we built it
We used Twilio to host a unique phone number which users can send SMS commands to. Twilio would then redirect the text message content to our Node.js back-end hosted on AWS which would parse the commands, analyze the request, and send back a stylized text message with the search results via Twilio. Easy as that!
Challenges we ran into
It is our first time using Node.js in a large project so we had a rough time learning on how to setup everything for it to work with our repository. We also ran into many errors which can be avoided (Lack of sleep, duh)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are extremely proud of our work since we were able to make it work as expected even though we ran into many problems that crippled us quite hard.
What we learned
Everything we did in this project is something either something new we've learned or something we've learned more in depth.
What's next for SMSME
We would hope that our project can eventually expand by adding the option to do phone calls to get the same result from an automatic machine. Ultimately, we would want this project
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.