Catbot

HACC 2021

The Hawaii Annual Code Challenge is an annual event that presents groups of developers real world problems for them to solve through a web application. There were different challenges that each team could choose from, which would affect the web application that group would create. The competition spans multiple weeks and consists of two rounds of competition. The first round mainly judges the implementation of the application. The second round consists of team presentations to a live panel of judges.

Catbot

The web application that my group created was called “Catbot”. It is a chatbot that would provide the user an insight into the many benefits that the Office of Hawaiian Affairs can provide, including loans, grants, and scholarships. The catbot is easy to use because it produces interactive buttons when it recognizes a broad statement regarding a topic. The web application utilized Google’s Dialogflow in order to take user input and provide a suitable answer. React, Meteor, Semantic UI, MongoDB, JavaScript, and HTML/CSS were all utilized in order to develop the web application. My contribution toward the project consisted of training the Dialogflow in order for the catbot to provide suitable and coherent responses. Below is an image of the landing page.

What I learned

This is my first experience developing an application in a team. I was able to learn about how to effectively communicate with others in regards to a project. I also learned how to utilize Dialogflow and train it in order to produce answers that didn’t seem super robotic and static.

The project repository can be found here.