Covi - Your friendly neighborhood covid bot

A fun and friendly way to learn about covid-19

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Inspiration

Covid-19 is always in front of our faces. Social distancing, store closures, mask requirements, and so much more have changed the way we go about our lives. Yet we barely comprehend the true scope of what is happening around us. To many, it may appear to just be an abstract and arbitrary set of rules we follow because someone said so.

This mindset isn't something restricted to the crazies which reject compliance. We may believe or assume that what we are doing is necessary, but it doesn't mean that we understand why it is the case. It is a seed of doubt that's been festering in the mind of many.

Is {some policy} actually going to do anything?

How big of a problem is this?

Isn't this possibly excessive?

To resolve this doubt, we must reconcile the abstraction with reality. We have to explain and quantify the situation.

And that is what we will do.

What it does

Covi's main goal is to educate people regarding covid-19 via the quantification and explanation of the problem at hand. This is accomplished via a variety of bot commands.

  • Quantification
    • Worldwide and national covid statistics
      • Take a look at the cases, deaths, administered tests, and more in any region in the world.
    • Worldwide and national covid news
      • Take a look at the trending covid related news in a region or in the world
  • Explanation
    • Competitive covid trivia game
      • Compete with other users to answer as many covid related problems as possible without messing up.
      • A high score system to see where you stack up
      • Explanations for each question to further your understanding
    • Covid tips and tricks
      • A guide to improve your safety and minimize the risk of infection

How we built it

Our bot was build in python using the Discord.py library to interface with discord. The bot is hosted on a Google Cloud VM.

We call upon other APIs to provide Covid information.

  • Serpapi was used to scrape google news for our news articles
  • Disease.sh - COVID-19: Worldometers and COVID-19: Vaccine were used for global and local covid statistics

Our tips and quiz problem set were written by ourselves using reputable sources for research, including the WHO and the CDC.

Challenges we ran into

We had some issues finding the right APIs for our application.

  • Finding a covid api with up to date information and of sufficient detail was quite difficult. Parsing the data was a whole other story.
  • Finding an API for getting news required quite a detour. We expected to just find an API which does exactly that, but we ended up having to turn to the news section of google search. It may appear somewhat obvious looking back, but making that connection just didn't occur to us easily.

Another issue we had was with correctly formatting the data for posts. We had to take a long look at the discord documentation to figure everything out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our project is quite polished. We filled in many edge cases that could've been skipped in a minimum viable product.

  • The highscore system works in all edge cases, like there being no scores yet
  • Error messages for any invalid entries a user posts, as well as examples for correct entries
  • A user won't have any duplicate questions when playing the game

What we learned

We learned how to work with APIs, parse them, and route that data into an application. We also learned to make a Discord bot

What's next for Covi - Covid themed discord bot

  • More bug fixes
  • More features
    • Configurable question sets
  • Enable users to add their own custom commands

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