Inspiration
We are graduate students from India who arrived in the US a couple of months back. One of our first challenges were in navigating our sprawling campus and getting to campus events on time. Although the university provides a portal to check information, it is very dated and difficult to use on the go.
So we built a chatbot (Sun Devil Assistant) that would instantly answer our queries on anything related to the campus scene whenever we want it through brief text messages.
What it does
Sun Devil Assistant helps you get information about events and places in a quick and timely manner. Also contacting emergency services when you need them is just a text away.
How We built it
We built a basic fully functional ChatBot leveraging the Facebook Messenger Platform. We used wit.ai a NLP service provided by Facebook for Natural Language Understanding. We bootstrapped our application to wit's responses and deployed our chat server using AWS and Heroku.
Challenges We ran into
NLP is still a very hard AI challenge and although we are very proud of what we achieved this weekend we would be kidding ourselves if we said that we cracked the problem. Having said that the bot does reasonably well for the small vocabulary of queries it is designed to handle.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Building a workable Chatbot in a day, deploying it and demoing it in our very first Hackathon.
What I learned
Chatbots are an interesting medium of interaction and engagement which we would definitely love to explore in the future.
What's next for SunDevil Assistant
1 - Notifications on Bookmarked Events 2 - Campus News & Sports Updates 3 - Extending the Knowledge Directory 4 - Better NLP and increased vocabulary in question answering 5 - Extend to other universities beyond ASU
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.