RingCentral’s Online Hackathon Results!
RingCentral has participated in and run several hackathons, both externally and internally.
When talking about a hackathon, we imagined spending a weekend together at an office space, grabbing drinks and random snacks along and teaming up with friends or strangers, to think about what to build and then building a great app to win a prize within 48 hours. But what about an online hackathon?
This was the first time RingCentral sponsored an online hackathon so the experience was new for us. We worked with DevPost who organized and promoted the hackathon for us. We didn’t have an office space with drinks or food, but we did have plenty of time and freedom.. The online hackathon started on Oct 12th, 2017 and ended on Jan 8th, 2018.
During the hackathon, RingCentral invited developers around the globe to build a chatbot from scratch or port existing messaging, virtual assistant, customer service, or e-commercial bots from other frameworks, into the RingCentral Glip bot framework.
What is RingCentral Glip?
RingCentral Glip, is an intuitive team messaging and collaboration app that lets you better manage information and application overload, overflowing email inboxes which resulted In a sense of disorganization. With file sharing, video and screen sharing, voice capabilities, and built in task management — Glip empowers you and your team to work better together and be more productive . Glip is a single hub that puts you at the center of communication.
Why would a Developer want to integrate with RingCentral Glip?
With a complete set of open APIs, and support for popular bot frameworks, RingCentral Glip enables developers to embed deeper collaboration and automate task functionalities into key business workflows, connecting cloud apps across the enterprise.
Developers were introduced to create a custom chatbot connected with leading AI engines, build custom alert bots that post notifications from other apps to predetermined teams, create new Glip teams and invite team members dynamically.
Exciting Innovation:
With more than 200 developers registered to compete for the prizes (up to $10,000 in cash!) and dozens of submissions. The 3 outstanding projects were selected and here is a snapshot of the winning ones.
Our third prize of 2,000 USD went to the Glip Stock Bot project. It is a simple bot which lets users quote for stock prices from Glip UI. This project got tie-breaking votes to win the 3rd prize. The better factor for it to be the winner came to the point that the developer took advantage of Glip Rich Attachments to enhance the user experience.
You can see the demo video or look at the code the author shared via his Github repo. And here is what the author want to share with the rest of us about his journey to win the prize.
The second prize of 3,000 USD went to the Glip AI News Bot project. The developer used Bing search API to fetch trending news and use the DialogFlow feature from API.AI to build natural and rich conversational experiences in his Glip chatbot.
See the demo video or look at the code the author shared via his Github repo.
The first prize of 5,000 USD went to the BotHisName project. The developer quoted that
“A Stanford researcher found that students in high-achieving communities who spend too much time on homework experience more stress, physical health problems, a lack of balance and even alienation from society (ref. link). Researchers in university labs, and employees in workplaces with jobs that require researching solutions to problems are equally stressful (one would imagine)! Interacting with a chatbot in a team environment may provide a fun solution to this problem!
Unless all your answers can be found on StackOverflow and github, we all turn to our trusted friend, Google. The only problem being that Google gives us 15 gazillion answers to each of our questions. Wait, I know what you’re thinking … What about that summary answer for simple questions that appears on top of the search results. Yes! That’s good! Now try something a little more complicated. How about asking Google the total length of all roads in Germany. Chances are that the first link (Wiki?) has your answer, but all we really want is a simple answer (to a complex question). That’s where BotsHisName, the bot, steps in.”
See the demo video or look at the code the author shared via his Github repo.
Once again, congratulations to all the 3 winners and our big thanks to all participants! Stay tuned for the next RingCentral hackathon.
