Humanitarian Chatbot

Inspiration

How does one use technology for the greater good? That is the first question our team asked ourselves when we started this hackathon. The goal was to find a technology/platform that could be used to help address ongoing issues around the globe. We wanted to create a virtual aid that could be informative and help people by providing accessible and reliable sources of information regarding humanitarian crises.

What it does

The humanitarian chatbot provides a user information only they request regarding a specific humanitarian crisis. Our primary goal is for the chatbot to become a trusted companion during difficult times, helping users make informed decisions and connect with necessary resources.

How we built it

Mainly used Google Cloud service Dialogflow, which is a natural language processing platform. We created an Agent, our machine learning model that is structured by several different intents and responses.

Challenges we ran into

Training the chatbot to recognize and respond to a wide range of user queries, how to structure the model using Dialogflow, and the process of integrating our chatbot to a specific platform. Specifically, training the model was one of the biggest challenges we ran into as when the model would identify the wrong intent based on the user query, we had to delete that query and retrain the model which costed us a lot of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learnt how to use Dialogflow and are more comfortable in using the Google Cloud Platform. None of the project members have used Dialogflow and also have little to no experience in using Google Cloud. However, now we feel way more comfortable in using the platform and wish to continue its services for future projects.

What we learned

The importance of dynamic responses and real-time information; significance of user-centric design, especially during crises; the challenges of integrating external APIs and keeping data current; the need for continuous improvement and expansion to meet evolving user needs.

What's next for Humanitarian Chatbot

Continue refining the chatbot's responses and capabilities based on user feedback and collaborate with humanitarian organizations to improve support and resource access, as we're committed to making the Humanitarian Chatbot an indispensable tool for individuals and communities facing crises.

Built With

• dialogflow-essentials
• github
• google-cloud
• python
• visual-studio-code