LinkLine

Inspiration

Seeing the rise of the gig economy made us realize that there are opportunities to take advantage of everywhere. We were inspired to solve the problem of increasing unemployment rates and the under-optimization of educated people in third world countries like India and the Philippines. As access to tech infrastructure is increasing, we need to think of ways that will allow people to harness this boon and empower them with opportunities.

What it does

LinkLine is a platform that can be thought of as Uber for Call Centers. The main idea is essentially to decentralize the call center model. In this model, agents from all over the world can register and can sign up to be an agent of any of the companies on the platform (after some training and testing). Now when a call comes in to the company, these calls are routed intelligently to the available agents for that company. For the companies, such a model makes sense as such a platform will not keep a agent busy taking their calls if the volume isn't high and the companies can pay on a per call basis. On the other hand the agents are not limited by a fixed schedule and can make money in the comfort of their home (somewhat like a gig based model). It also eliminates the two biggest cost factors that traditional call center's face: transportation and capital costs.

How we built it

We created a unique webRTC application that leverages the power of automation, custom built routing systems and natural language processing. For this project we utilised the lightweight structure of Flask and Python, as well Redis to manage data storage acting as a cache layer to a persistent SQL database. We also took advantage of the power of Google cloud to create a seamless NLP tool.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was getting our diverse stack of technologies to play nice together. Our routing system also proved to be quite a tough task, as it required us to manage multiple incoming connections from a variety of different clients, all trying to reach the same number.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Realtime routing amongst available agents registered on the platform
Dynamic information processing for the agent based on the information provided by the agents in real time
Transcription of the voice calls for analysis
The infrastructure of the application powered by webRTC

What we learned

One of our biggest takeaways from this hackathon was the true power of pair programming.

What's next for LinkLine

Our next steps will involve linking up with small businesses and setting up a training module to better prepare our agents for the responsibilities facing them. We also plan to build out the platform more and introduce more features regarding the comprehensive displaying of relevant info for our agents.