Find a Cab

Effortless booking of cab for you

Comment

Inspiration

This booking services provide cabs for interstate travel. Traveling interstate has been very easy pre Covid, we have buses, Uber etc but during this pandemic I got to realize that this simple task has gotten very complicated with uber drivers stopping their service , while various state needing permit to travel. In this kind of scenario local businesses has started thriving as they know the state policies for their local area and many local routes which are not known on google maps which generally big companies use. So my app took inspiration from this.This messenger app will be very useful for small businesses which can do effortless booking from messenger bot without creating expensive websites or apps.

What it does

  1. This app does immediate booking for a. people traveling interstate, b. If people needs good to be transferred form 1 state to another after the booking done which take approximate 5-10 min, a person from the company can later call or message customer with other details

  2. It also provide service to talk to a customer agent regarding any queries.

How I built it

I used glitch for server hosting and mongo DB for database. Since its a basic version so for now I am taking only Indian state and Indian phone number as its use cases. I used quick replies for all the small options Handover protocol is used when customer use option "Talk to Us" In this the thread is passed from main app to page inbox, which can be returned back when agent click done on messenger

Challenges I ran into

  1. Thinking of a use case to solve using messenger which could be later leveraged for business cases was hard part.
  2. Connecting the system with Mongo DB was challenging because I have to make sure the data always remain in sync with the app
  3. storing session variable for the app was challenging because messenger doesn't provide anything on its own.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is the first time I was creating a messenger bot right from scratch and I am proud of how it all worked out

What I learned

The project was a huge learning curve for me.It gave me a lot of insights on how chat bots worked and how sessions are managed.Using messenger special feature Quick replies and handover protocol was also new to me. Overall I learned how to create a effortless communication between bot and user by handling all kind of scenarios/conversations that could occur .

What's next for Find A cab

I want it to be a template for messenger appointment bot. In later stages I could customize it to cater to different kind of industry like salon appointment etc.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates