Inspiration
We were thinking about how difficult it is when we go travelling and can decide on what we want to do or where we want to go, and all the while we're hungry because we don't know where we should go to eat! We decided to make iTourBot to help individuals like us who travel but also do not like sticking to a strict plan
What it does
iTourBot lists all interesting attractions, activities and food places in a travel destination and makes setting up a loose travel itinerary easy. After making the itinerary, the user can access the their saved locations by texting and SMS to a our dedicated hub.
How we built it
The front end was designed using android studio which fetches points of interest from a database made from mongoDB. After the itinerary is made its sent to an SMS hub that is built using messagebird's SMS api so the user can access the information vs texts
Challenges we ran into
We found that designing the front end with android studio was a lot harder than we anticipated as none of us have any experience with app development. Another challenge we ran into was sending data from the database to the app on the phone to the SMS hub so that you could easily access
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Developing a chatbot that can go through the itinerary and differentiate between type (i.e. restaurant, attraction, activity) and reply to an incoming text with a list of points of interests in the category the user requested
What we learned
We learned how to use the messagebird api effectively and how to parse through large sets of data to retrieve the important information while discard or abstracting the rest. We also learned a few things about app design and development such as how to layout buttons, what activities are and how to handle events that are triggered
What's next for iTourBot
To solve the front end issue and make the GUI as elegant as possible. We also want to make geotracking available so that people can get realtime updates about landmarks and attractions that they are close to.
Built With
- android-studio
- mongodb
- stdlib
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.