Inspiration
Parking tickets are one of those things that seemingly everyone gets, even for the most arbitrary of reasons, that seem difficult and confusing to contest, yet can really put you back financially if you're already not in a great spot. We decided to make a chatter bot to make it simple and easy to contest illegitamate parking tickets that cities issue, just to make a few extra bucks off of it's citizens. But while $100 may not be much to some people, to someone who is already teetering on the edge of poverty, living paycheck to paycheck, one hundred dollars may mean missing dinner, all to line the pockets of the city.
What it does
The chatterbot asks a series questions and interprets english answers in an easy to understand way, using the Wit.ai english language interpreter. The bot then determines if you are able to contest the ticket, and auto creates an appropriate letter just for you.
How we built it
We built it using a standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript front end, for our web interface, and under the hood we are using Node.js to communicate between Wit.ai, the web end, as well as using it to handle some of the background information for Wit.ai. Lastly we have a few python scripts created for easy use.
Challenges we ran into
Honestly the hardest part wasn't building a web interface from the ground up, nor was it building the bot, it was struggling through a lack of documentation on Wit.ai. Gifs are not fun things to learn from, especially when there are very important concepts which aren't really discussed explicitly like context and what it does.
What we learned
What we got most out of this was probably using machine interpretation of language. The ability to train off of just a few examples and then get the system to understand that "yes I would very much like to do that" means the same thing as "please" is absolutely thrilling, and it's something that as individuals going forth from now, we'll be definitely looking into doing more of: creating more chat bots and bettering our skills at facilitating easy human-computer interaction.
What's next for Ticket Eater
We're looking at expanding this to handle more than just the state of Michigan, as well as making it able to contest speeding tickets, auto-issue DMCA notices, and so on.
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