Inspiration

Our team all live in HDBs and we are very familiar with what usually goes on in HDB car parks. There were times when the gantry might not be functioning well which brings great inconvenience to residents, or the condition of the car parks might not be ideal. We wanted to develop a way for residents to share such concerns with ease and also be able to keep themselves updated with the maintenance work going on.

What it does

Telegram bot asks for the location (name of the area, eg. Bishan)
Bot shows a list of nearby car parks for the user to choose
Users choose whether they want to:
- File a report - the user sends their complaint
- Check Maintenance - user can see the most updated image of the work being done and the expected completion date (if any)
Python stores the responses and updates the flat files used for HDB's perusal

How we built it

Our logic code is done with python and we used flat files like json to store complaints from users and the car parks that are undergoing maintenance. We get our car park data from data.gov (Query: https://data.gov.sg/api/action/datastore_search)

Challenges we ran into

We were unable to make use of the live location feature to get nearby car parks based on the dataset we have. Debugging was also hard as there was limited information online for certain errors encountered and we were all new to developing a telegram chatbot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were glad to get the bot up and running and manage to function as we hoped. We also added elements of the Singaporean spirit by using Singlish and slangs in our auto-replies to keep it fun and casual for the user :)

What we learned

A tele bot may seem very simple on telegram itself but there is a lot of backend work needed to function and maintain the chatbot. In terms of technical skills, we definitely have learned a lot about what goes into creating a telegram chatbot and the libraries like telegram in python. There was heavy research done to achieve the correct syntax for many of the codes used as we were all new to the libraries used.

What's next for Team#_KeepingUpWithHDB

We would love to improve and expand on this bot over time and overcome the challenges stated above. We really believe that is bot can bring great convenience to residents and encourage them to engage in the well-being of their estate as what HDB hopes for.

Done by: Quek Ying En Delaney, Shreyas Pramod Hegde, Shawn Yap Zheng Yi, Agnes Tan Ziqi