The problem CoRelief solves

Given the current global situation, it is extremely easy for people locked up in their homes to fall prey to certain apprehensions and anxieties about the future, to be specific-their future. With people being laid off from their jobs or for those who have lost their jobs(hand to mouths), or people at risk of Covid-19, currently quarantined- the list goes on and on about the various things that might haunt them. As a result, although staying at home is the only option, yet putting one's mental health at stake is not viable. There is a heap of information being circulated through social media and not all of it is claimable.

CoRelief is a chatbot based on hybrid Natural Language Processing, which helps people deal with this difficult time and get rid of their COVID-19 related anxieties. The chatbot has been extensively trained and deployed using Cloud Functions for Firebase. The web application offers the chatbot that the users can chat with at any time to get advice related to jobs, internships, anxieties, exams, social distancing, quarantine and more! CoRelief can be accessed by anybody and will act as a friend fo people who are currently alone or for anybody with some doubts in mind. This chatbot aims to cheer up the person and give him/her hope during this stressful period of time.

Challenges we ran into

The challenge that we ran into was to design the conversational user interface for this context to handle different user queries. The conversational user interface, that is how the conversation has been designed plays an important role towards the success of the conversation with the user. Thus, designing this involved thinking of various cases that users might be going through and handle all possible scenarios and provide the respective response back to the user. Another issue that we faced was to integrate the chatbot to a web application and customise the chat UI. After a lot of hit-and-tries we worked with React.js and the Kendo UI framework for react to customise the chat screen and make it more intuitive and interactive.