Chatbot Hackathon🥈
🥈 Our team won second place for a hack-a-bot (chatbot hackathon)
We won 2nd place 🥈
Incredibly proud of our team! We had a goal to build a companion chatbot to help us feel more safe - meet Aura, a companion chatbot to get you where you need to go, safely.
Well done everyone!
Everyone in my team were part of a Women in tech discord group and we got together as a team to join this hackathon. We initally had a rough idea on what sort of things we want to build.
We initally were going to build a React Native app (cross platform mobile app with chatbot functionality as its main feature) and we did start the project with this in mind but along the way, we came across a few hiccups which meant we had to make a quick decision how to go forward with the project.
We built the prototype in Voiceflow and then implemented this in Slackbot. The idea is as professionals or users who have access to Slack, this companion chatbot can help you navigate when you are out and about. Being able to ask the bot about how safe the destination you are going to? This calls an endpoint that gathers crime data over time in a region. We'd be more informed and more cautious about the places we go to.
This project was heavily inspired and motivated by Sarah Everard case that happened recently in the United Kingdom. We wanted women and everyone to feel safe when they are out and about.
This was a 24-hour hackathon. Our team was amazing and the team work was brilliant, everyone was very supportive of each other! We also had to navigate working with different timezones which was good as that meant we all could chip in at different times of the day. We all had a bit of sleep and we all really put so much effort into this.
I navigated this hackathon whilst looking after a 1 year old. It really was challenging as there were times I had to step away to feed my son but the team was supportive and I also had a supportive husband who stepped up to take my son after each feed. It was a fun and memorable time and I learned a lot about not only the tech stack we used, but also collaboration, managing and navigating a project.