dropBF

If you type in something which doesn't correspond to Lyft, the bot will not do anything, and just mention this.
When user says or mentions Lyft to bot, the bot will ask for the permission to get the current location.
Once the bot has the current location it creates a DeepLink for Lyft with Destination set as the address of the sender.

Inspiration

Suppose you have an inebriated friend who needs help getting home. However, you have no idea where he is and any type of communication leaves you clueless to his location. It would be great if there was simple way to send a pre-filled lyft ride request to your friend that would bring him or her to you? That is what dropBF aims to accomplish

What it does

We created a Facebook messenger bot that upon having a conversation with will generate a filled Lyft request to another user. It requires only the current location and will bring the receiving user to the sending user.

How we built it

We created a custom page, bot, and webhook that we deployed to a public Heroku server. The webhook will monitor and conversations/interactions sent to the bot and ping the server for various responses.

Challenges we ran into

A major impediment to our development was the limiting capabilities of Facebook messenger. In order to create a one-click button to be sent to another user, we had to generate a completely filled out Lyft Request, deep-link, versus a half complete deep-link. Upon conversation with mentors from Lyft, Facebook, and Microsoft we tried to implement various hacks around the issue to no avail.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Understand and create our custom Facebook messenger bot that would respond to various messages in different manners. We were able to generate a deep-link Lyft URL that can be pasted into a browser to create the pre-filled Lyft request.

What we learned

How Facebook Messenger bots work. Lyft deep-links. Server generation and server-side functions.

What's next for dropBF

Create a workaround for the Facebook Messenger URL limitation. There's added URL data added to any URL we generate that blocks the Lyft deep-link from working properly.