Inspiration

Given the current lockdown status of the world, we tend to run out of things to do whilst waiting for our friends to reply on Messenger. So our team thought "Why not play a quick game without having to leave the app?", thus this idea. With QuizzyBot you can put your general knowledge to the test! Call on QuizzyBot to play a quick, fun quiz. Now you ensure you leave lockdown more educated than you were before you entered it!

What it does

At a high level: a user can request the Bot to ask them a question by sending the message "Ask me a question". After which they are presented with multiple potential answers to the question asked. If the user selects the correct answer then the Bot will congratulate them. Otherwise, if a wrong answer is submitted the Bot will inform them that it's wrong and give details of the write answer. The Bot will always give the user the option to ask for another question post evaluation.

How we built it

As messenger bots use webhooks to handle the messages that they received, we decided to use Express.js running in a Node application, as this is the industry standard for web servers, and especially for API servers. We have hosted in it Heroku as its free and simple to use, and is recommended in the documentation on how to deploy messenger webhook servers. We have made it completely stateless so we do not use a database and don't use any users data

The use of quick replies allowed us to let the players answer with a simple press of a button rather than having to type the answer. This also eliminated the risk of having a typo in answers.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some issues getting QuizzyBot approved. Although it met all of Facebook's guide lines it was rejected without any proper explanation. Regardless, we didn't let this discourage us - rather, we saw this as an opportunity, so we made improvements to the application (still within guidelines) given we had some time to properly test it before final submission.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The Power of Friendship: Extremely sound teamwork and collaboration. Everybody managed to play a role and work effectively to make this happen. And of course, every engineer is always proud to be a part of the process in creating something cool!

What we learned

We learnt how easy it is to build a Facebook messenger bot which we can leverage in the future to improve our user engagement in a quick and easy way. The fact that quick replies are so quick to implement and improve the end user's experience makes them invaluable and means that there is a less chance of users sending messages that our bot won't recognise

Beyond the technical know-how, we learnt how to effectively manage the team so that there was maximum through-put - especially because we were extremely limited on time.

What's next for QuizzyBot

We could expand QuizzyBot to be a more robust ChatBot that could perhaps be able to be a Quiz Master for a whole group of people. If it wasn't for time, we would've integrated this with Instagram/WhatsApp by using the Handover Protocol.