McAsks

Answer questions on the fly, right from your mobile phone!

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Inspiration

We have all been in a situation where we didn’t have access to the internet but needed it to perform something crucial. As outdoor enthusiasts, there are many times when we wish we could use that little bit of entertainment and utility, making our way through the backcountry. Around the world, only 3.3 billion people access the internet via mobile, compared to 5 billion who use SMS services. The lack of consistent internet access has proven to be detrimental sociologically and economically, and we aim to solve a portion of that problem through McAsks.

What it does

McAsks allows users to ask questions via SMS and receive instantaneous answers. 🤩🤩 These questions can range from finding information 🔍 to directions if you’re lost 🗺️. We’ve also included fun easter eggs like “cat” — get an adorable cat picture — and “cowsay” — a mimic of linux’s iconic and favourite cow. 🐱🐮

How we built it

We started by prototyping the app in Figma and discussing our vision for McAsks. From there, we separated into our unique roles within the team.

The chatbot application is implemented as a Flask web service. Through webhooks, the application is able to communicate with the Twilio SMS API, facilitating third-party API calls. We made heavy use of the M3O Cloud Platform and its APIs, as well as relying on Geoapify, WeatherAPI, and DuckDuckGo to provide auxiliary features. We also utilized the nltk library for data cleaning and processing.

The accompanying website is built with Next.js, an open-source React framework for building statically generated sites. We used M3O’s DB API as our backend database, experimenting with JAMStack design principles (https://jamstack.org/).

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Challenges we ran into

Life happens, and unfortunately, ​​many of us could not commit as many hours as we hoped this weekend. That said, we made sure to collaborate efficiently and work hard, and are thrilled to exceed many goals we set for ourselves at the start of the hack! 🥰🥰

Accomplishments that we're proud of

McAsks itself!! 😍 We can’t wait to see what use cases our users can think of! 😲😲 We are also proud of ourselves for stepping out of our comfort zone to discover and learn new tools and skills, successfully integrating multiple technologies to create a cohesive project. 🛠️🛠️

What we learned

Alison learned how to use figma! Yay! 🤣 We also picked up more experience working with APIs, particularly that of Twilio! 🎉🎉

What's next for McAsks

We have many exciting plans for McAsks! First off, we plan to double the number of commands we support, as well as further hone our natural language processing capabilities. You may have noticed the terms “Ask+” and “AskFree” on our website 👀 - yes, we are also planning to introduce a paid tier for those who find the service useful in their lives! We have truly enjoyed our time developing McAsks, and hope to see it continue to grow and mature! 🥳🥳

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