Joi | Devpost

Joi: by the Tyrell Corporation

Inspiration

We were inspired by the heroes of the Blade Runner series, the Tyrell Corporation, who revolutionised the way human beings think through the use of simulacra. The name of our project, Joi, is a homage to the artificial intelligence in Blade Runner 2049 who helped the rogue police officer Joe to carve out his own destiny.

What it does

Joi is a Telegram chatbot that utilises B. F. Skinner's theories on behaviour to motivate computer science students to get a better GPA. Joi remembers your GPA goals and helps you to work towards it.

When first talking to Joi, the user is prompted to add her into a Telegram group with some of the user's real-life friends. The user is then prompted to share an embarrassing photo of himself with Joi; in the event that he does not realise his GPA goal, Joi will send the image of him to his friend-group, embarrassing him.

The fear of embarrassment provides a powerful negative reinforcement that drives the user to study hard and achieve his goals. In addition, having Joi interact with friends of the user provides a powerful social support system for the user.

How we built it

Joi was built using pyTelegramBotAPI, which we have used to facilitate the functionality of the bot. Also, we used MongoDB as a database to contain the user's information and pictures sent.

Challenges we ran into

We faced difficulty initially during the first few hours of the hackathon since some of us faced issues with the compatibility of the project. In solving this, our team used Replit, an online IDE, where we could use the same virtual environment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of working effectively as a team to come up with an idea that's light-hearted and interesting.

What we learned

Since it was our first time creating telegram bots, we have learnt a ton about what telegram bots can do and how we could use them creatively. Furthermore, we learnt ways of using NoSQL databases such as MongoDB to facilitate functionalities within a python application.

What's next for Joi

The goal of this project is to encourage users to take their academics more seriously in a manner that's light-hearted and fun. In doing so, we have future plans on expanding onto what's already been implemented.

On top of the humiliation from the embarrassing photo, we intend on having the bot send daily encouraging messages and reminders to the user. We hope that this can give greater impetus for the user to do well academically.