Data Lit Bot

Inspiration

A few things inspired this bot: first, the message from a recent data science conference speaker who talked about the importance of cultivating data literacy in our society; second, the usefulness of InsideSherpa's free and virtual Data Programs and third, wanting to code a bot for the very first time!

What it does

This Twilio-powered bot matches the user to one of InsideSherpa's free Virtual Data Programs.

How I built it

I used my working knowledge of JavaScript, ES6 and the Twilio platform to create this chatbot. For simplicity, I decided to demo it using their built-in simulator.

Challenges I ran into

Initially, I could not get my function to communicate with the "tasks" portion of the bot. Eventually I moved a few lines around and went through my code line by line (as the debugger wasn't particularly helpful--maybe I need to get better at using it) and the problem was fixed.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Coding my first bot using Twilio!

What I learned

I learned how to "glue" various parts of my code in such a way that they communicated with each other even though they did not reside in the same location.

What's next for Data Lit Bot

Many improvements can be made but the first would be obtaining a Twilio number so that my bot can be accessed through it and second, challenging myself to make an intermediate version of this simple bot. I believe the latter can be accomplished as I have the basics down.

Built With

• autopilot
• javascript
• json
• twilio