Covid Chatbot

For our final project in 314, my team and I decided to enter the Hawaii Annual Coding Challenge (HACC) 2020 with our project idea of creating a covid chatbot site where people in Hawaii can go to find relevant information about covid surrounding the state of Hawaii. With our site, people can communicate with our chatbot AI and ask questions that they might have about covid like “where are the nearest testing sites” and “what are the symptoms of covid?”. Our project also features an admin role where admins can safely manage the chatbot’s responses and add new information to the chatbot’s dialog.

Our team decided to create an admin role for our chatbot because we wanted people to be able to directly manage the chatbot’s responses on the same user interface without having to switch over to Google’s DialogFlow site. Our chatbot uses Google’s DialogFlow to train the AI bot to recognize the questions and be able to respond back with the correct answer. Adding new responses requires us to work on the Google’s DialogFlow application website which can be quite confusing to newcomers learning how to use our site. So we made it so that people don’t need to switch over and instead, just focus on doing everything on our end.

Participating in this year’s HACC was very stressful but at the same time it was rewarding and interesting to see what projects and ideas the other team had in mind and how they brought that to life. It proved difficult to my team because we were on a time crunch and only had a limited number of weeks to get our project going. HACC’s deadline was much sooner than the deadline for the 314 final project so our team had to meet up twice as much to get everything done. At first we were skeptical about finishing the project on time because there were a lot of features that we had to implement and polish. Incorporating Google’s API into our project was the hardest part because we had to fully understand how the API worked and somehow intertwine the code to fit with our code. With a little bit of help from Branden and Dr. Johnson, we were able to successfully get our code running and ended up placing first place for HACC! I am forever grateful for the hard work that our team put into and the countless hours that we spent on it. I wouldn’t have asked for a better team!

You can view our chatbot journey here