Valentina's Hotline

Inspiration

We were inspired by the story of an Ohio woman who called 911 to "order pizza," but was instead using it as a front to report domestic violence against her mother while her abuser was in the room. As technology advances, making a phone call to order pizza is now less common, so we had the idea to create a website, where you can "order pizza" through a chatbot to discreetly contact the proper authorities.

What it does

The user can use this site to "order pizza" with a chatbot created with Twilio, when in reality they are actually chatting with a bot to report their situation to the police in a subtle way.

How we built it

We used HTML and CSS to build the website and Twilio's chatbot API to create the chatbot.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to design the website in a way such that it didn't look completely like a front, and as no members of out team have experience in design, we struggled to make the website look legitimate. On top of this, we knew very little about what an API was, and much less how to use one, so we had to slowly learn how to use Twilio to create the bot. After creating the bot in Twilio, we spent hours trying to connect it with our website, but ended up not having enough time to learn the implementation, thus we left the chatbot demonstration as a video on the "Order" page for our demo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to learn how to use an API to create a fully functional chatbot, and made great strides in learning how to connect that backend piece to our frontend, and we're proud of this even if we haven't fully figured it out yet. We also were able to pull out each team members strong suits - each of us had experience in different fields and were able to combine them to create this functioning website.

What we learned

We learned how to effectively communicate in what we could each be doing to create our project, and how to delegate tasks to efficiently use the short time we had to program the website. We also all learned how to use Twilio's API, and are looking forward to learning and utilizing more new technologies in the future.

What's next for Valentina's Hotline

Next, we will try to fully connect the chatbot we created to the website so that when the user clicks on "order" they can actually chat and have their information sent to 911 to receive help.