Guess what? Haptik held India’s first ever hackathon for chatbots in Bangalore

On December 10th and 11th, Haptik, in collaboration with TLabs conducted India’s first ever Botathon, i.e., a hackathon for chatbots in Bangalore. This event witnessed participation from over 97 engineers and developers from across 10 cities including Hyderabad, Jaipur, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. The participating teams were given 2 days to create chatbots across multiple platforms to solve a range of common yet complicated problems across areas.

The chatbots which were created during the botathon were spread acroiss various industries, right from Education, Agriculture, Entertainment to Health and Nutrition and Home Automation.

A few examples of the chatbots created during the event include a bot that helps you study engineering, a bot that helps you take notes during class. Then there was a bot to help educate farmers, help them book soil tests and based on the samples, get reports from government officials. Additionally, the botathon also witnessed the creation of a bot that helps users keep track of calories and their weight goals and a bot that could control the electronics at your home with a simple message

After two days of brainstorming and frantic coding, the judges shortlisted 10 bots and amongst them three winners were chosen.

Here are the teams which made the three best chatbots:


• Winners: CStrikers
Swarndeep S Arora and Anshuman Dhamoon developed a bot that helps users keep a track of their fitness goals and motivates them to achieve them by analysing their daily calorie intake and suggesting appropriate diet and workout regime

• First Runner-up: BroCorp
Rohin Gopalakrishnan and Arvind Kumar developed a Facebook Messenger bot with focus on customer experience. Their bot - BroTender - aims to automate and simplify customer interaction at bars and restaurants without the need for the long waits for waiters and bartenders to take the orders. A user can ask the bot for the menu or have it recommend one based on their personalized taste in a restaurant. The bot also keeps a track of the user’s favourite meal from a previous order, splits payments with friends and will pay off the bill from the wallet integrated within

• Second Runner-up: Sven
Ganesh Kumar R P and Arvind Thangamani created a slack bot (DJ) for the team, which team members can use to request for a song of their choice. As requests keep coming in, it queues them and also accepts controls like 'next', 'pause', 'clear playlist' to operate on the playlist. Using machine learning to further enhance the experience, the bot also suggests songs to the team based on the songs played thus far