VinqBot

Be in sync with your team, collaborators and across all your work apps!

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Inspiration

The concept of a project assistant chatbot came as a result of my personal experience while working with a team of developers as a lead developer. I observed that 70% of the time developers in my team rarely updates Trello of changes and tasks carried out in our project repository and when they do, it's either not detailed enough or they write update at a later time which sometimes causes inefficient management problems when tasks and update on the codebase are inter dependent and decisions needs to be made on them.

While researching on solutions for this problem I further observed another interesting problem, teams usually uses different work apps like Trello, Google Drive, Github, Slack etc and keeping track of all important actions carried out on these work apps is cumbersome when on the go or on mobile, especially because sometimes their push notifications does not trigger or is non existing for example, Slack mobile, or shared document been edited on Google Drive. This problem is five times more common if the team members are remote. A few tools that tries to tackle this in several ways were available in the Github Marketplace but they were either expensive or UI was too complicated to use.

What it does

So I decided to build one in a very simplified, easily accessible and comfortable conversation interface which should also provide analytics and reports of activities on monitored project repo. Vinqbot also provide a centralized notification medium or channel, curated from activities across work apps, this way team members are always on the loop and makes sure all activity on whatever work apps a team uses gets broadcasted and the whole team stay updated in real time.

How we built it

We built the Vinqbot using Botpress, which has Messenger and DialogFlow NLP api modules. The server was built using Feathers which is heavily dependent on express and socket.io for events. Vinqbot rely on the official Github nodejs API and Google Drive nodejs API for each integration respectively.

Challenges we ran into

The most challenge encountered was having proper integration with Github and Google Drive webhook or notification service, especially relaying and broadcasting notification to the targeted Messenger user.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have been able to integrate Github and Google Drive within the chatbot. Google Drive integration is still in testing and iterations.

What we learned

We had to create a form of custom webhook/push service on top of existing ones provided by Github and Google Drive to target the right messenger user, which we will still use for any other services we will integrate with.

What's next for VinqBot

We want to make our AI assistant Gabe, more robust and smart yet simple to users, we believe that's the future. We will integrate more work apps, like Google Drive, GitLab, DropBox, Trello, provide report export to Drive documents, analytics and also build a Slack version of VinqBot. We strongly know that the over 23% of workers who prefer to work remotely globally will love what we have built.

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