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Main Landing Page
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Mia Chatbot window for users looking to volunteer during COVID-19.
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Organization dashboard where applicants are listed.
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Organization dashboard that allows organizations to have real-time conversations with users.
Inspiration
With the pandemic comes permanent changes in every industry -- HR is no exception. Post-COVID times will be marked with a resurge in employment and volunteering opportunities, but with stricter social distancing rules comes a more constrained hiring process in terms of resources and time. Matilda aims to optimize the job search process for those in most urgent need but little to no experience, using conversational AI to match candidates with the best opportunities to their skillset and needs, while adapting the aspect of human interaction to social distancing realities.
//The Canadian government has recently announced grants for people that would be volunteering. However, non-profit organizations are struggling to answer the many emails they receive, and citizens often don't know where to start. Knowing many young people would be offering their help, we thought of building a conversational agent using Google's Dialogflow, as AI-powered chat is an increasingly popular medium for communication.
What it does
At its core, Mia connects users with organizations, facilitating the application process from both sides by offering an AI streamlined approach. For people looking to sign up for volunteering opportunities, they can start talking to the chatbot. Mia asks different questions and even your location, to find the closest opportunities near you in order to offer the safest and most personalized volunteering opportunity. For organizations, Mia is a platform that allows them to streamline their recruiting process. It helps quickly eliminate invalid candidates and only find themselves with candidates that are a good fit for their criteria.
How we built it
The backend for the chatbot was built using Dialogflow and written with JavaScript. It runs on Node.js for the backend. Angular.js has also been looked into for the front-end, though we did not have time to finish coding it. Hence, in the interest of saving time, we used Webflow to build the front-end of our website, as well as to prototype our future features. Webflow offers all the power of HTML, CSS and Javascript, but in a visual canvas. This allowed us to build our solution in a matter of days.
Challenges we ran into
Steven: I never had experience with Dialogflow and Node.js, which meant that I had to learn everything before going forward with this project. We also wanted to build our custom UI for the chatbot, but it required us to use some other kind of framework such as Angular.js, which we had no experience with. In the end, we stuck with the default Dialogflow themed UI for the chatbot.
Lucas: Being in charge of the front-end, I really wanted to be able to integrate the chat window into the rest of our UI. Unfortunately, this requires frameworks such as Angular.js, which I am unfamiliar with. The time constraint was also a factor, as I am usually very picky about the choice of colours, fonts, etc. However, both of these challenges pushed us to learn and create faster.
Accomplishments that We are proud of
We are extremely happy to be able to make a functioning chatbot, which can have meaningful conversations and redirect users to volunteering opportunities in town. We also have an extremely well-done user-friendly interface which facilitates the experience for users to sign up for volunteering opportunities! .
What we learned
Steven: Through this project, I learned to use many different frameworks and tools such as Dialogflow, Node.js and Angular.js. I am personally a very Python guy, so this project has forced me to step out of my comfort zone in order to come up with something meaningful and impactful!
Lucas: I usually build my prototypes using Adobe XD, but I tried building them directly in Webflow in order to save time. I must say I really enjoyed this workflow: it allows me to build functional webpages while prototyping the front end for our future features. Once we are ready to integrate the back-end, we can just export the code and build our app directly from our site.
What's next for Hey Mia!
We plan on expanding the functionalities by partnering up with local organizations and using our chatbot to directly store users' information.
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