What it does

Talking2U is a chat bot that can provide either COVID-19 statistics from around the world, or it can help check your symptoms based on official government guidelines.

If the user asks for statistics, the chat bot can prompt the user for a more specific inquiry by asking which country they would like to check, and which province/state they would like to see statistics from (if this is applicable to the country). Furthermore, that chat bot will ask if they would like to see the number of confirmed cases, recovered cases, deaths, or all three of these options.

If the user asks to check their symptoms, the chat bot will ask what kind of symptoms the user is experiencing using questions from the Government of Canada's COVID-19 self-assessment tool and, based on the user's responses, will suggest appropriate actions to take.

How we built it

We built the bot using Python and and open-source API called Covid-19-API by M-Media-Group on GitHub (https://github.com/M-Media-Group/Covid-19-API).

Challenges we ran into

We had a hard time learning how to use an API for the first time, as well as getting the bot to recognize key words found in the sentences that the user inputs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Working together as relatively new programmers and creating a fully-functional chat bot is something that we're quite proud of.

What we learned

We learned how to access APIs by using the requests module in Python, and we also learned how to process the received data and present it in a useful and effective format by using the json module.