RingBot VA

RingBot is a virtual assistant that is always ready to help you make calls

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Inspiration

As introverts, one of our biggest fears is being stuck in a social situation like a party after our social batteries run out, and all we can hope for is an excuse to leave. With more than 7 in 10 Canadians self identifying as introverts, I am sure many people have been stuck in the same or similar situations.

With our inspiration in mind, my partner and I set out to create a solution for introverts and people with social anxiety. (It can also order pizza for you too!)

What it does

By messaging our specialized Twilio number, you can have a conversation with our virtual AI chatbot Olivia. We have trained the AI to recognize specific intents in Voiceflow, which will result in certain functions being performed.

Have you ever been too nervous to order delivery from a restaurant? Olivia has a takeout ordering feature that allows her to make calls on your behalf. She will ask you for your order via SMS and make the call for you with a realistic AI voice that changes depending on the context of the conversation.

Another one of Olivia's functions is what we call our SOS excuse call. Once this function has been initialized, Olivia will call the user requesting help and insists that the user comes to her aid. This gives the user a perfectly valid excuse to leave their current situation such as getting out of a party or even worse... an awkward date.

How we built it

Using Twilio's SMS and TTS features for communication with the user, as well as integrating OpenAI's ChatGPT model as Olivia's brain, we created a program that can be used to generate creative and unique responses. The main SMS chatbot system runs on Voiceflow with their intent features to dynamically determine what the user needs assistance with and helps direct Olivia to the correct function.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We feel incredibly proud of our overall completion of RingBot VA.

Having only two members, with one member only being self taught for under 2 months with little to no practical experience, going into this hackathon we had very low expectations, with our main goal being to learn new technologies. However, as we steadily progressed and our code started finally working, so did our overall confidence and excitement.

As we were both learning Twilio, OpenAI APIs, Voiceflow, and Node.js for the first time while working on this project, it was incredibly rewarding to figure out and complete each portion of the necessary code to make a worthy project to be submitted.

What's next for RingBot VA

As we were working on the RingBot program, we started seeing many more possibilities for future usage.

One such possibility was to increase the number of functions so RingBot could be a virtual assistant for not just introverts but everyone alike. We hope to let Olivia act as your personal representative with the ability to set meetings, attend business calls, and even create reports from her previous calls. We also considered adding more AI voices and using Elevenlab's TTS instead of Amazon Polly, as Elevenlab's has higher quality AI voice models.

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