Dine Bot

Inspiration

If you’ve ever catered an event, you know how stressful it can be to meet everyone’s constantly changing needs. Whether preparing for Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, or Easter, were ready to make your life a little easier by finding the optimal recipes to accommodate the pickiest guest.

What it does

Just give us the phone number, and our chat will not do the rest. Once your attendees respond, we will send you tailored catering and recipe choices that everyone will be happy with. (The no risky links, No hassle.)

Q -2, -1 are only for the organizer Q-2. What is your culinary skill level?

Beginners (Learning What is...)
Novice (Learning how to perform & follow cooking tasks....)
Intermediate (Understanding why we use these techniques.....)
Proficient (Understanding when to use these techniques......)
Experts (Intuitive.......) Q-1. How much time do you have to cook? [ min(s)] “0=catering.”

Q 0, 1, and 2 are for the guest (Chat Bot) Q0. Do you have any of the following health concerns that require dietary accommodation? Text back the appropriate letters one at a time, if any, then type NEXT a. General Health b. Brain c. Cardiovascular d. Digestive e. Infection f. Female Health
Q1. Do you have any allergies? Text back the appropriate letters one at a time, if any, then type NEXT a. Shellfish b. Gluten c. Tree nut d. Egg e. Soy f. Sesame g. Fish Q2. What are your other dietary restrictions? Text back the appropriate letters one at a time, if any, then type NEXT a. Vegetarian b. Vegan c. Kosher d. Keto e. Low Carb f. Halal

Q3. It is a post-meal survey. Q3. (1-10)

How we built it

Every project starts with research, and we read two books, 183 articles, and 65 studies and conducted customer discovery by interviewing people who follow the diets in question. Our team is diverse, so our collective lifetime culinary knowledge has much to pull from.

We then expanded its function to group planning by developing a Twillio SMS chat Bot to RSVP each person's diet needs.

Challenges we ran into

We set out to interview a General Physician, a Doctor of Nutritional Science, and a small sample group of Halal and Kosher followers. Unfortunately, the only General Physician to respond was available after the hackathon competition date. My sample size for Halal was only two. My sample size for Kosher was one, but he was an expert on historical and modern Hebrew food law.

Testing the chatbot interface on a trial account was difficult, as we had limited accessibility to Twilio.