An Offline Chatbot

We recently had a challenge to take EVE (Our flagship Chatbot product) offline i.e to work via normal sms chats. This post takes you through our research journey.

What we thought would work

Basic electronics common sense led us to emply a simple GSM (SIM800a) together with a nodemcu module. It worked thanks to Daniel Mawalla who did the heavy lifting. After Godson Ezekiel the current EVE chatbot lead, intergrated the actual chatbot, messages were seen to be slow as ***.

Buy the costly one ?

Like every other common folk, we thought to buy another expensive GSM hopping it will solve the issue only to findout the issue lies with the fundamental slow of the GSM technology and its syschronous nature and other many limitations. So we dropped this option.

Right in our pockets, the solution lies 😄

After some discussions we thought, our phone are already effecient at sending and receiving sms, why not use them instead. We were suprised after a simple google search only to discover there are actually a billion solutions using this idea; A smartphone as an sms gateway. So we didn't build anything from scratch we deployed an existing one instead. check it out here ☎️ Android SMS Gateway

conclusion

It was fun. can't wait the next adventure 🤗