Hello, Twilio hackers! I'm a little late to the party, but there's still a week left in the hackathon. So why not put a submission in?
While I was traveling to visit my family in Sénégal, West Africa, the whole Covid-19 mess happened. Instead of sitting idle and not do anything, I decided to do a Machine Learning bootcamp at Vivadata Dakar cohort and finally add some artificial intelligence to my arsenal. Boy, I'm glad I did!
Professor Andrew Ng was famously quoted for saying "Artificial Intelligence is the new electricity.". It's going to affect and improve every aspect of our lives. But access to this nascent and game-changing technology is fairly limited. It's still very specialized knowledge. What can we do to get it into the hands of the people who need it the most, like here in West Africa?
SMS is a great equalizer. You don't need the internet (only cellular connection is enough), and you certainly do not need a fancy super powerful phone. The idea is to build a simple enough API endpoint to serve Machine Learning models, then leverage the Twilio system to allow for any participants to get results back by sending messages to a specified Twilio phone number. I've seen some seemingly working prototypes out there, but they work like black boxes. We don't really know how they work.
My goal with this hackathon is to utilize the Machine Learning knowledge I've recently acquired, to build an intelligent SMS system prototype from scratch and to open source it. Since there isn't much time left, let's get to work.
Happy hacking!
Poster Photo by Trevor Cole on Unsplash
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