VibrantChat

Inspiration

We were inspired by the need to help clients access their personal safety plans in an easy, dynamic and engaging manner.

What it does

It provides a chatbot for the counsellor to create a personal safety plan in a secure manner, and to share that with the caller. The caller can later access it in a secure manner and share it if they choose to.

How we built it

We used Lex to built a chat bot that uses Lambda as the back end to store the details of the personal safety plans. We use S3 with an added layer of encryption and with lifecycle policies to ensure private data is destroyed within a specific time window of not being accessed.

Challenges we ran into

Privacy and security concerns. It forced us to innovate on how to tackle the handling of personally identifiable information (PII) and we ended up with using S3's built-in lifecycle management for that.

Also working Lex we needed to ensure we define custom slot types and test for the open-ended questions the plan asks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got a working demo with a secure architecture and got the chance to talk to AWS experts in the areas we needed most (compliance!) We talked to multiple stakeholders from Vibrant and we felt like we understood their issue and were able to plan a reasonable minimum viable product (MVP) for today.

What we learned

You need to focus on keeping our MVP small - there is risk of overthinking and adding features that we do not have time to do. We learned about many new technologies including Lex, S3 presigned URLs, S3 lifetime policies and more!