Hawaii Covid Convo

COVID-19 Chat-Bot

My first semester at UH Manoa was a tough one. There was a significant jump in difficulty for my classes, and the semester was amongst the COVID-19 pandemic, so all classes were taught online. But there was one class that stood out to me, and that was ICS 314 - software engineering. I did not know what to expect for the class, but I knew that it would be difficult and intense. In the end, it turned out to be a great experience and by the end of the semester I realized that I really enjoyed developing applications in the class. The final assignment was a final project where we were expected to develop fully functional web application that would allow us to demonstrate the skills we learned in the class. We were assigned to work in groups of four and were required to choose one type of application to create. Our group ended up deciding on creating a Hawaii COVID-19 chatbot application that allowed users to receive an answer whenever asking the chat-bot a question about COVID-19.

Our group ended up successfully creating a fully functioning chat-bot application with many different implementations. We added a home page, an about page, a user feedback page, and an analytics page that would display the user feedback to a logged in user so that improvements to the application can be made. Our group also managed to implement responses to more than 50 different questions that could be asked about COVID-19. To view our application, you can click on this link.

Contribution and Approach

Our group approached this project with issue driven project management, where we assigned lightweight tasks consistently to each group member. This allowed our group members to work on their own individual tasks without causing any issues or overrides to other tasks that members were working on. This also enabled us to efficiently hit the requirements for each of the 3 milestones for our project. I contributed to the development of this application by doing research on the questions and the answers that our chat-bot could receive and provide back to the user. I also researched and helped implement the chat-bot itself using Google Dialogflow, which is a natural language platform that helps with implementing conversational user interfaces into applications. I was also assigned the task of creating user feedback forms, where users of our application are able to fill out a form and provide feedback on what they think can be improved about the application. This feedback would be later displayed to a user that had an account with our website. As of now, I consider this project to be my biggest accomplishment as an aspiring software engineer.

Skills Developed from this Project

This project helped me develop and sharpen a lot skills that I will continue to use in the future. It required organization and time management to make sure that our group would meet each milestone’s requirements, as well as good communication skills with others to make sure that we were all completing our tasks and keeping up to date with the progress of the project. This project also helped sharpen my problem-solving skills, as there were a lot of issues that we had run into during the development progress that required a lot of testing and trial and error. To view our chat-bot application’s organization page and view our code and issues, you can click here. If you would like to learn more about our application, you can visit our projects home page here.