Housemate

Inspiration

Coming from experience, we know how frustrating it is to find student housing. Housemate was made to help you easily find housing with nothing more than a conversation with our chat bot.

What it does

Housemate is a Facebook chat bot that helps students find housing near their University

How we built it

We built it using Python, Flask and the Facebook messenger API as well as api.ai for natural language processing.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many problems with some technologies we decided to use, especially since no group member had worked with every technology we used. Originally we were tried to connect 2 technologies that seemed incompatible. Due to the inconvience, we decieded to use other technologies that proved easier to handle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our application returns a carousel of the most optimal houses/apartments, with an image and a link to the correspondant entry. As I type this message, we're trying to wrap up implementing Natural Language Processing into our application.

What we learned

In addition to every group member learning and working on a new technology they hadn't before, Our full team was formed at MHacks, and we have formed a strong level of cohesiveness and teamwork. We learned that setting up the entire infrastructure, was, as to be expected, a considerable task.

What's next for Housemate

We plan on improving our natural language proccessing, and possibly in the future implimenting Machine Learning to improve results for our users. Additionally, we'd like to introduce some more input validation and sanitization to make it more friendly for the user.

NOTE

Because we made our application at MHacks and deployed it entirely towards the last leg of the event, we were not able to make an official app review to Facebook for the public use of our application. That being said, we can actively test our application and can show it to you and allow you to use it. For this reason, we've linked our github below.

Thumbnail image credit: Andrew Doane, The Noun Project