A final-year student of the University of Ghana (UG) has developed a bot on Twitter that automatically calculates and tweets the E-levy charges one would pay on any amount.
The bot named ‘Ghana Information Hub’ receives the response when a user tags @ghanainfohub and asks how much they will pay for E-levy on an amount of money.
It then, under a minute, replies the tweet and gives a feedback of the exact E-levy to be paid for the amount of money.
Explaining how the bot works, Kenneth Frimpong – a final-year student in the Department of Information Studies – stated that “one has to sign up or log in to a Twitter account and tweet ‘@ghanainfohub how much e-levy do I have to pay on an amount of money?’ – for instance, ¢1,000.00.”
“The individual then receives the retweet, ‘you will pay ¢15.00 on ¢1,000.00’. The twitter user receives the response in less than a minute and this service is available 24 hours every day of the week,” he added.
Kenneth Frimpong says he is working to develop more features on the bot to provide up-to-date information on job openings, current affairs, weather conditions and prices of fuel and currencies.
He is also looking at enhancing access to information on health-related issues as well as in the social and business fields to reflect the name of the Ghana Information Hub.
According to Kenneth, this idea developed while studying Programming of Information Centre Application.
He gained experience in coding using Python programming language, especially when he and other students were introduced to practical coding, demystified computer programming, among other related works.
As part of the course, the final-year students developed applications as final projects, which formed 30% of their assessment.
This eventually led to the development of this Twitter bot by Kenneth Frimpong.
Lecturer of the course, Dr Karim Awudu, has expressed excitement about the various innovative applications developed by his students.
“I am excited to see my students, especially Kenneth, applying the skills and knowledge acquired from the course to provide real-life information solutions.”
“My students have developed various applications and Kenneth’s project is one of the best. We are working on other projects as well and I wish him well. The sky is the limit,” he said.