Here at TG4 Solutions, our passion for technology extends past the normal applications. In today’s post, we will discuss how we combined our passion for technology with our passion for Madden NFL 19. For years members of our company have participated in online leagues. However, there was a common theme across every release. You have to be on your system to view league information. In order to decrease this dependency, we created a Madden NFL 19 GroupMe chatbot that connects you to league data. Enabling users to stay up to date with their league, even when not logged in to their system.
Why a GroupMe chatbot is valuable
You may be wondering, why GroupMe? Most Madden leagues within our company use GroupMe as their primary source of communication. Knowing this, we decided to create a chatbot that would provide league info (e.g. team records, conference standings, & team stats) upon request within a group chat. Not only does the bot help to keep members informed of league info, it helps to provide context to discussions/banter within the chat.
How we built our Madden NFL 19 GroupMe chatbot
Our Madden NFL 19 chatbot consists of an Application Programming Interface (API), that interacts with the Madden NFL 19 Companion app. EA Sports developed the Madden NFL 19 Companion app to allow users to export league data. By integrating with the companion app, we are able to capture and store the most recent league information. The other component of our chatbot consist of integrating with GroupMe. We created a bot, added it to a group, and specified an endpoint for all the messages in the group to be sent. With this infrastructure in place, we are able to have our bot interact with group members based on any logic we put in place.
How It Works
How does our GroupMe bot work? Our bot looks for specific keywords within each message posted in the group. Based on the keyword, our bot will perform an action and return the results as a message to the group. All keywords must be prefixed with a forward slash. For example, if a message contains “/help” our bot will recognize it and respond with a help prompt educating users of its purpose and abilities. Below you can find a video of our bot in action.
Conclusion
Our Madden NFL 19 GroupMe chatbot was a fun way for us to fulfill a need while using some new technologies. In a future post, we will discuss in detail the technologies we used and the design of our bot.
Looking to implement our bot for your league? Contact us, we would love to help you. Our code is also available on GitHub.