The problem covibot solves

Our bot reads through the latest posts an a given subreddit, scans them for keywords/phrases, and decides the whether the user is travelling to a particular place or not. In the case that they are, covibot replies to OP with real-time COVID-19 stats about the particular region they are travelling to. This helps ensure that people don't put themselves at risk, as they are immediately given relevant, helpful information. While this may not be a product people realise they need, we feel that it will become hugely popular.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges for deploying our bot was the fact that we wanted it to be up and running 24/7. This proved to be a challenge as we didn't want our personal computer constantly chacking on the subreddit, and processing the large datasets routinely. Due to the limited time we had to develop our product, we couldn't use a cloud hosting solution like Heroku to host our bot. So, we ended up processing locally, but instead of routinely checking the subreddit, we manually run the bot whenever we want. In the short term, it gives us the same results, but in the near future, we plan to bring our bot to life by hosting it on a free server.