SpinIt Singapore

A Telegram bot that suggests food or things to do in Singapore so you don't have to. This bot works off a crowdsourced repository of local favorites and small businesses #supportlocal

Comment

Inspiration

This Telegram bot is inspired by the creators' chronic decision-making issues - we can never decide what to eat or what to do (besides the incessant TikTok scrolling). The idea of the Spinit bot (short for SingaporePin It) stems from our desire to create an online repository of local favourites, ranging from food to lifestyle to outdoor activities. By building on a crowdsourced database, we hope to inspire Singaporeans to step out of their comfort zone and let a bot decide their itinerary and calories for the day. We hope to eliminate decision-making fatigue in the everyday Singaporean by limiting the choices they have to make (eg. simply choosing if they are looking for lunch or dinner), as compared to other applications where they have a variety of specific categories to choose from. Furthermore, this serves as an important means of online archival, reflecting the trends of our generation. By promoting a culture of #supportlocal, we also hope that this would help revive small businesses in Singapore after getting hit hard by the pandemic.

How to Try

Find the telegram bot at @spinit_sg_bot!

What it does

Users can simply use the /spin command to get a location/activity recommendation directly from the bot. You will be prompted 3 categories namely: "Food", "Lifestyle" or "OutAndAbout" Upon selecting the "Food" category, users will be prompted to select an option from "Lunch", "Cafe/Snack" and "Dinner". These recommendations are then randomly selected from the crowdsourced list of locations which is consistently growing from user suggestions.

(In the future) Users can use the /suggest command to allow users to suggestions a location for the Spinit team to review and add into the crowdsourced repository of pins.

How we built it

This telegram bot was built with Python3 and the pyTelegramBotAPI library. pyTelegramBotAPI

A little bit of designing work went into the telegram bot display pic to add some life to the bot.

Challenges we ran into

This is the first time we are building a telegram bot and it was difficult finding the right language to build this bot. We ultimately settled on python as it only required a single library to build it. Knowing how python packages work, we decided to ensure that we were using virtual environments for better package management. It took us some time to set up this virtual environments. As the pyTelegramBotAPI was built on top of the Telegram bot API, it was confusing and tedious to look through the documentation, but after carefully reading it, we managed to figure out what we needed to do to get what we wanted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building a Telegram bot from scratch.
  • Solving a problem that we ourselves are facing.
  • Incorporating #supportlocal into our idea and potential spreading awareness to locally owned businesses.

What we learned

  • How to build a telegram bot
  • What it takes to integrate with the Google Maps API ($$$)

What's next for SpinIt Singapore

  • Integrating with the Google Maps API to display a crowdsourced map of user submitted pins.

  • More commands in the telegram bot to allow users to discover for more locally owned businesses and workshops.

  • Allow users to build their own list of pins

  • Store crowdsourced pins in a proper database (e.g PostgreSQL)

  • More filters like "Brown Owned", "LGBTQ+" friendly businesses / establishments

Built With

Share this project:

Updates