1G. M. Mostaço, 2I. R. Souza, 2L. B. Campos, 1C. E. Cugnasca
1. Department of Computer Engineering and Digital Systems – Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) – São Paulo, Brazil
2. Coordination of Information Systems – Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia da Bahia (IFBA) – Vitória da Conquista, Bahia, Brazil
Mobile devices advanced adoption has fostered the creation of various messaging applications providing convenience and practicality in general communication. In this sense, new technologies arise bringing automatic, continuous and intelligent features for communication through messaging applications by using web robots, also called Chatbots. Those are computer programs that simulate a real conversation between humans to answer questions or do tasks, giving the impression that the person is talking to someone else and not with a computer program. For agricultural purposes, it is important that the data about field conditions, such as air and soil temperature, air relative humidity, soil moisture, rainfall, wind speed and other relevant variables, be rapid and easily available for use by farm management systems, by specialists, or the farmer itself in decision-making processes. AgronomoBot was developed focused on the search and display of data acquired from a Wireless Sensor Network deployed on a vineyard. It is based on Telegram Bot API and is able to access information collected by eKo field sensors, bringing it back to a user through interaction over the Telegram application. The IBM Watson cognition services platform was also used for improving the user experience by enabling the use of natural language during the conversation experience, providing intention detection. Further developments are planned for AgronomoBot, such as the expansion to other messaging platforms, the implementation of speech communication capacity, image classification and continuous data analysis. It is hoped that with analytical capacity over the mass of available data, it becomes possible to work towards the prevention of harmful situations to agricultural productions, early detection of diseases in crops, energy and water waste reduction, and advanced management capabilities for the farmer.