Rescugee

Inspiration

The political and military situation in Syria (since 2011) has not ended. According to Amnesty International, over 8 million people (> population of New York City) have been displaced from Syria, seeking a safer, more stable life in Europe or America.

According to a Penn State study in 2015, about 86% of youth refugees have phones with geolocation. We thought we could create a chatbot to help refugees find important resources in their journey to find solace.

What it does

Rescugee is a chatbot that can take text messages as input and then quickly output instructions or a map of where to find a desired resource. It currently supports searching for food, water, health services, and legal advice.

How we built it

The chatbot is built on Motion.ai with NodeJS handling the backend requests. NodeJS takes the input and sends requests to GoogleMaps to find directions to the desired resource.

Challenges we ran into

We quickly realized that we would need to support multiple languages on our chatbot. While our team doesn't have the linguistic experience to craft eloquent chat responses, but the functionality works with Arabic translations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

No one on our team has had experience writing NodeJS or structuring the logic for a chatbot. Being able to learn and create a functioning chatbot in 24 hours is something we take pride in.

What we learned

Logic for Chatbots can get really complicated, really quick.

What's next for Rescugee

If we had the resources and backing, we could pay for a membership on Motion.ai so that it supports SMS text messaging. Also, we could expand the language pack so that the service is more accessible to the countless refugee groups around the world.

Code Submission Disclosure

The code submitted (and seen on the provided GitHub) is only the NodeJS portion of the chatbot. The logic and flow of the chatbot was made on Motion.ai, which does not translate onto text files. If you would like to see our work on the Motion.ai interface, just let us know.