SUREBot

UI Homepage

Inspiration

Welcome to SUREBot, an intelligent bot used to make getting home easier, safer, and less stressful for UT students. SURE Walk is dedicated to eliminating sexual assault and other forms of interpersonal violence from our campus community. To reach this goal, they provide safe walks and rides home, to reduce the risk of assault occurring. However, they also aim to educate the community on assault, consent, healthy relationships, and resources for survivors of assault. Currently, SURE Walk schedules pick-ups via phone calls or physical sign ups in the Jester dorm.

What it does

SUREBot represents the chance to streamline the process, making it easier for students to be picked up whenever and wherever; rather than have to wait for a volunteer to answer the phone, students can quickly create a request via SMS. When in the Admin view, users can easily check current load for each volunteer as well as assign rides to SURE Walk volunteers based on proximity. In the volunteer view, users have the opportunity to update status for each student they interact with, notifying the admin whenever they pick up and/or drop off a student as well as having a clearly displayed list of students in their queue. Overall, SUREBot represents a way to streamline the process of requesting and assigning escorts home, presenting a possible increase of efficiency for the program and helping garner even more interest.

How we built it

We used Microsoft Bot Framework and Azure services as well as Firebase for the database. To code, we used Node.js (for the bot) and Javascript, HTML, and CSS (for the web UI).

Challenges we ran into

Attempting to deploy the bot to the cloud. Also, we faced several issues with the different services we wanted to link to SUREBot, specifically with Facebook Messenger. We also faced issues with integrating different hosting services for the web application and database.