I have created a GTalk bot to find next available bus for Blacksburg Transit buses in Virginia Tech, Blacksburg. BTransit buses are frequently used by students in Virginia Tech to commute across the Town of Blacksburg and Virginia Tech campus. So I thought a GTalk bot which can tell next available bus time will be useful to many students and so here it is.
To use the bot, add the following user to your friends list in GTalk.
GTalk Id: bt.timechecker.bot<at>gmail<dot>com
Usage: Route=<bus_route>
Once you add, the user bot will be online and you can interact with it as a normal friend. To find next available bus, type in the command “Route=<bus_route>”, <bus_route> being the bus you want the schedule for. Currently though it will support only Tom Creek’s A bus route (<bus_route>: TCA). I hope to add other routes data soon. It will fetch you next available bus time based on the current date and time and display it.
This is done as part of my project in Network Architecture Protocol course. But actually, I got the idea of doing something like this in my last semester course User Interface Software, where we were evaluating VoiceXML and how users can manage and access data easily. That time I thought of doing it as voice interface but dint get through. So now since I got an opportunity, I have implemented that idea in a GTalk bot. I also know of an iPhone application which can find the schedule of BT buses.
Hope this bot will be useful, please leave your comments on what you think.
Disclaimer: This bot is unofficial and no way related to Blacksburg Transit company. This is just done as an experiment personally, use at your own risk!
Tagged bot, btransit, gtalk, labs
Nice work Rahul. I used it and works pretty well, I am not sure how useful it would be but that depends on how I use it.
Sometime I will look into how you did it and we can come up with a plan for similar bot for iPhone/iPod touch
Thanks man!
I think it will be useful if all the routes are implemented, so one need not go to BT website or BT schedule, they can just find in chat which they mostly use. Lets see how it goes.
Btw, I think Manas has done it for iPhone, will try to get the link for it.
Great job, Rahul! Here’s the link to mine as you asked via Twitter. Don’t spend time re-coding the transit schedules, I’ll get you an API for that in about 2-3 weeks’ time. It’s a weird mess of conditions (weekday/weekend, regular/break), so I can’t just give you the data without the rules.