Taxpert

Taxpert is an AI chatbot over SMS that helps you fill out your taxes.

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Inspiration

Taxes are hard! Why can't there be something simple to help us file a 2 page document without spending hundreds on an accountant?

What it does

Taxpert is an Artificial Intelligence SMS chatbox tax-filing assistant. Our AI, Yuuki, not only helps you understand your 1040 tax document and how to fill it out, but will also take your answers and will fill it out for you and submit it then sending you a pdf copy of your tax document that is completed.

How we built it

We built it using Twilio to send a text to our server that then sends that information over to IBM Watson using express. Our server ran on Node.js. After Watson receives it and understand the input it sends its information back to the server and then back to the user using Twilio. The server also takes all the user input variables to be entered into the pdf and uses Apache to fill it out. The final pdf is then sent to the user as an html url.

Challenges we ran into

We have never worked with sending a pdf over SMS or filling out a pdf given input. Another challenge was trying to understand the 1040 tax form enough to be able to teach our AI about it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of overcoming our challenges and are proud of learning so much from building this. We are so happy that this service is over SMS so not only can people with smartphones and dataplans and/or wifi can use it, but anyone with any type of phone can use it.

What we learned

We learned how to fill out a pdf that is unique to each user. We also learned a lot about using IBM Watson and Twilio. We also discovered just how difficult taxes are.

What's next for Taxpert

We want to continue to train out AI to learn more about taxes so that she can better help our customers. We also need to tweak the code for better error handling.

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