Whatsapp is one of the most popular messaging apps and due to being so popular it is often used for many things that it’s not best suited for. One of them being to save data or track things in a Whatsapp group.
But that runs into problems very quick, even if we assume that everyone is disciplined enough to not use the update logging group for only that and no other messages, the constant sliding up and down, checking timestamps, filtering updates for a specific location/person is not convenient.
But, expecting the people on site to create a database of their progress is also unrealistic, So, that’s where this bot fits in. First of all it eliminates the need to fill up whatsapp group, the group can be used simply for conversations and information sharing. And all the updates will be shared by engineers to the bot instead of the group, which would do the implementation in the background to output the organized and useful data.
So, the basic idea if for the people to use the same exact workflow that they do, but give them more organized and high quality output in a format that’s best suited for it, instead of everyone having to read and search the chats.
One of the main problem with the popular ‘whatsapp group’ approach is the clutter that get along with it, when a person sends a message, requesting some action for the supervisor or any other person, someone might have a conflict with that or would want something else to be prioritized, even if they have no authority over the work, and even though most would simply dismiss that, but to the person who wants to make sense of the entire day’s work at last it is a visual and mental clutter. Going for single chat over group keeps everyone focused on their part and avoids crosstalks that aren’t necessary.
And despite having all these solo chats, the contributors and the supervisor gets a single organized sheet(unless configured otherwise) of the entire days work, and everyone only have to save the bot’s number which remains same whether there are 5 or 50 contributors.
Once setup the bot doesn’t require much work, as the admins in the group will have the options like add_users, remove_users,add_admin,etc, to keep the bot updated. For problems an issues related to the custom build the admin can always contact us for any problem beyond their fixing.
Although app works with any business chat with any media there are a few recommendations to make the functions even smoother. The contributors should avoid changing the name frequently as that can lead to confusion and conflict with the past names.
Also it is recommended to switch the google sheet when one project is finished and moving to another, although even on the same sheet it would work perfectly fine, but the new sheet would save you from having to put on one additional filter.
The implementation of the bot is also straightforward, so we use a phone number to be the official number of the bot.
Then we connect gemini to our bot’s codebase so it can analyse images that are being added and give them a severity. Also it renamed the photo so the phone number of the person who attached the photo is always in it.
Then we use gemini to also extract data from text like the site, the room number, the project name, all of which gets saved in the google sheets.
And there are some default values associated with each message, like the name of the uploader, the timestamp of the message, the project they’re working on(and any other custom value as per the setup),etc.
Finally the saved output is send to wherever to the contributors and the supervisor. Or any other relevant person that is added to the recipients list.