NewToSF

Inspiration

Today is our team member Igor's second day in SF, and things are confusing. You pay tips here in the US, right? In which neighborhood should I look for an AirBnB? Are scooters the best form of transportation in the city? Where do all the cool kids network?

Wouldn't it be lovely to have a buddy to help with this? Introducing NewToSF, a local bot that helps new arrivals to get up to speed.

What It Does

The NewToSF Bot is the local guide for new arrivals. The bot knows the best tips from locals (we ran a survey during the hackathon and collected the data), current and future events, can recommend places to rent, apps to use, etc.

How we built it

Poe is an incredible platform for building bots. Our experience with it was super smooth, so we focused on the most important things: the content, the data, the actual knowledge, and insights.

We created a Google form and collected the best tips on local life, which we put in the knowledge base. In addition, we did five in-person interviews.

We also prepared a list of relevant events so the bot can recommend how to spend a weekend, and it suggests different events depending on your goal!

Finally, we made sure that the tone of voice of the bot is just right

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was making the dates work when asking for the events on a given date. We ran a bunch of experiments and were finally able to get rid of hallucinations by formatting the list of events in the knowledge base in a specific format and also mentioning this specific format in the prompt.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The bot is cool and is actually useful. We can confidently say that because we have Igor, who has just arrived and is now using the bot a lot.

What we learned

A ton of tricks in prompt engineering! For example, did you know that you can ask the bot to pretend to have an SMS conversation to make the messages more to the point?

What's next for NewToSF

Today, we focused on making the thing as useful to a newcomer as possible, given the time we had. We cut some corners during this process; for example, we used a static file with events, not a function that searches a database. So the most logical next step is to make the bot use live data about current events and news to give an even better experience

Built With

• poe