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TouchGrass FC: a Telegram bot whose only goal is to make you close Telegram

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass What I Built Every pickup football group has the same thread. "Saturday?" "Maybe." "What time?" "After work." "Which Saturday?" Twenty messages later, nobody has committed and nobody has played. TouchGrass FC is a Telegram group bot that replaces that thread with one question and one poll. Someone types /play…

TouchGrass FC is a Telegram group bot designed to simplify the process of organizing pickup football matches among friends. Instead of dealing with a flurry of messages asking "when can we all play?" and "what time works for everyone?", the bot streamlines the conversation into a single poll, asking participants to indicate their availability.

Once the bot receives the replies, it uses a local Gemma model to convert the chat replies into a structured format, checking the weather forecast and filtering out any time slots that fall after sunset. The bot then selects the best available slot, finds the nearest pitch on OpenStreetMap, and posts a poll with a map pin to the Telegram group.

After the match, the bot sends a reminder three hours prior to the kickoff and asks participants if they actually played. The main metric of success is the number of actual matches played, displayed via the /stats command. The bot uses only one message and one tap from each player, minimizing the required interaction. The only metric reported is the total matches played.

Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.

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