Lyff

Inspiration

Sometimes, you find yourself without Internet or data and really need to call a Lyft. Lyff lets you call a Lyft with just a quick phone call!

What It Does

Users can call 1-888-970-LYFF, where an automated chatbot will guide them through the process of ordering a Lyft to their final destination. Users can simply look at the street name and number of the closest building to acquire their current location.

How It's Built

We used the Nexmo API from Vonage to handle the voice aspect, Amazon Lex to create a chatbot and parse the speech input, Amazon Lambda to implement the internal application logic, the Lyft API for obvious reasons, and Google Maps API to sanitize the locations.

Built With

Python
Google Maps Geocoder API
Nexmo API
Amazon Lex
Amazon Lambda
Lyft API

Team

This app was built at PennApps Fall 2017 by Akash Levy, Zachary Liu, Selina Wang, and David Fan. Awarded Best Use of Vonage/Nexmo API! See our DevPost page: https://devpost.com/software/lyff

Installation Instructions

Clone this repository
Set up an S3 bucket:
- Go to
- Create a bucket for storing user Lyft access tokens (you can use the default settings)
- Create AWS credentials for accessing this bucket and copy them into lyff_lambda/rootkey.csv in the following format:
```
AWSAccessKeyId=<ACCESS_KEY>
AWSSecretKey=<SECRET_KEY>
```
Set up your Lyft developer app:
- and login
- Substitute your Client ID and Client Secret into lyff_lambda/lyff_creds.py
Set up your Amazon Lambda function for the chatbot logic:
- Go to
- Click on "Create Function"
- Click "Author from Scratch"
- No triggers necessary
- Pick a name, runtime environment should be Python 2.7, use lambda_basic_execution role
- Confirm and create function
- Zip all the files in lyff_lambda/ and upload this ZIP file as the Lambda function
- Click "Save"
Set up your Amazon Lex bot:
- Go to
- Create a new bot
- Add a slot called "RideTypes" with the following settings:
- Add a slot called "Status" with the following settings:
- Add a slot called "YesNo" with the following settings:
- Make your setup look like this:
- Click "Save Intent" then "Build"
- Click "Publish" and create a new alias (we called ours "Prod")
- Create AWS credentials for accessing this Lex bot and copy them into nexmo/rootkey.csv in the following format:
```
AWSAccessKeyId=<ACCESS_KEY>
AWSSecretKey=<SECRET_KEY>
```
Set up your Lex connector:
- Run the server provided by at a URL that is accessible to Nexmo. We used Amazon EC2 and configured the domain to be publicly accessible. Alternatively, once the fixes to lex-connector in Zach's fork are pulled into the , you can follow to use Nexmo's default connector to Amazon Lex.
- Modify the uri attribute in nexmo/ncco.json to look like this:
```
wss://LEX_CONNECTOR_ENDPOINT/bot/BOTNAME/alias/PUBLISH_ALIAS/user/AWSServiceRoleForLexBots/content
```
- Leave the AWS_KEY_HERE and AWS_SECRET_HERE in this file untouched
Set up your Amazon Lambda function for the dynamic NCCO fetcher:
- Go to
- Click on "Create Function"
- Click "Author from Scratch"
- Add an "API Gateway" trigger with default settings
- Setup your IAM role so your endpoint is accessible to Nexmo
- Pick a name, runtime environment should be Python 2.7, use lambda_basic_execution role
- Confirm and create function
- Zip all the files in lyff_lambda/ and upload this ZIP file as the Lambda function
- Click "Save"
- Make the function publicly access
Set up Nexmo:
- and add enough money to buy a number
- Install the Nexmo CLI: npm install -g nexmo-cli
- Run nexmo app:create "Lyff" <NCCO_FETCHER_LAMBDA_FUNCTION_PUBLIC_URL> http://example.com and you should get your app ID
- Link your app to your phone number with nexmo link:app <PHONE_NUMBER_HERE> <APP_ID_HERE>
You're done! Try calling your phone number to make sure everything works!