Health Hero Bot
Health Hero Bot (HHBot) is a chat bot to help you and your team can make healthier choices and have fun doing it by tracking their meals, movements and mindfulness in one simple step.
I built the new chat bot platform from scratch as a fresh Ruby on Rails app in around three weeks, initially for the Slack chat platform and app directory, but with the core logic and functionality self-contained so that other platforms could more easily be added.
While different platforms do have different sets of functionality, largely the core of the chat bot would work on any text based platform, with text coming in, being processed, and a text response being returned, or an image being uploaded, processed, and a text response returned. By building it in this way, it made it easy to then add additional support for MS Teams, and to pave the way for future integrations. Custom functionality for individual platforms was layered on top (such as reaction support on Slack, for example).
This particular bot utilised AI (artificial intelligence) and NLP (natural language parsing) APIs, along with image recognition, to provide a smart, flexible interaction flow for users, moving away from set commands, and more towards natural language. Image recognition allows users to upload photos, and have the bot automatically categorize it as a meal, a movement or a mindfulness activity, with admin tools to allow moderation and correction of mistakes, and system learning to continually improve that recognition.
Ruby on Rails • Chatbot • AI • Slack