Talons | Devpost

Talons - A Productivity Hack

Description

The hunt for productivity is preyed on by Talons, the sharpest discord bot! Talons is your peak performance sidekick armed with the Pomodoro technique, reminders, and SMS for your next mission.

Inspiration

We noticed issues firsthand in terms of productivity and completing tasks. As students who religiously use discord, while we are on our laptops/desktops working, we miss reminders on our silent phones or forget to actually complete tasks or attend events. This inconvenience gave us the opportunity to create Talons, the discord bot. Talons bring a well-rounded productivity experience, with a built-in Pomodoro technique, and personal reminders with pings and SMS.

What it does

Have you ever lost track of your tasks and reminders when you’re on discord? Have you ever felt that having a multi-purpose task-notifier could be beneficial to you? Our discord bot “Talons” is the perfect way to set up your important reminders and tasks that you so often forget. This discord bot is a multi-purpose productivity tool that will help you organize your tasks an stay on track using the following commands:

$setup
$replaceNumber
$replaceEmail
$addReminder
$deleteReminder
$showReminders
$pomodoro
$startWorkTime
$startBreakTime

Using these commands, you will be able to:
Setup a phone number and an email address that you would like the reminder to be sent to
Replace the phone number you inputted with a new one
Replace the email address you inputted with a new one
Add a reminder with the message and the intended time
Delete a reminder with the message and the intended time
Show your current reminders
Add a Pomodoro timer for your work and break routine
Execute your work time routine
Execute your break time routine …… This bot will send you an SMS with your personalized message as a reminder, mention you in the discord channel and it can even be extended so that it can email you with a link you would like to join for a zoom meeting, just so you can keep track of your tasks. Our domain allows you to access our services as well.

How we built it

We built it using Python, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, the nextCord API, and the Twilio API. We used Python to develop the bot commands to work in sync with the nextCord API. We made several commands, but our biggest concern was coming up with a suitable database to manipulate different instances of the bot for each specific user. As the Discord IDs are very long, we considered using Hashtables, but we then found a better solution - Dictionaries, which would be very simple to implement and it would also allow us to be more flexible with our options. Then, we integrated the Twilio API into the code so that each time a reminder is passed, its corresponding message also gets sent to the user as an SMS. We also made the code extendable to even emails if need be in the future. We made the website using JavaScript, CSS, and HTML and styled it to suit our purposes. Along with the description of our bot, the download button allows the user to navigate the GitHub repository as well.

Challenges we ran into

When developing this bot, we planned on combining many different APIs and platforms and so, it became harder to implement the timer and it was quite challenging to maintain different instances of different users at the same time, without losing track of each one. We found our way around it using appropriate use of object allocation. Along with this, our busy schedule only allowed us to be available at a certain time, which is why we were limited to the functionalities we finalized.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Considering our lack of experience with the development of discord bots, we were able to successfully create a fully functioning multi-purpose bot that can completely help you keep track of your reminders and allow you to stay focused on each task. We are very proud that we were able to interconnect different APIs and programming languages to make the final project work.

What we learned

We learned how fast we are able to grasp the functionalities and implementations of new APIs and this opens up an array of prospects for us to explore during future hackathons. Our main purpose for creating this bot was to help people understand the importance of time, and in fact, this bot even helped us while developing it as we were also able to list tasks that were to be done.

What's next for Talons

We have made this project very modifiable and scalable for future projects as well. We have even made the functionality of emails a possibility in the future. This project is quite ambitious considering how much traffic discord sees daily. Servers are always a great way of introducing new bots and these bots are a game-changer as a lot of people are active on discord, while they keep their phones or reminders on silent mode. This can even be extended into a domain that we are planning on creating in the future.