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Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Get Fare Estimates for Uber Taxis on Twitter

How much will it cost if you are take an Uber taxi from point A to point B? Uber’s mobile app has a built-in fare estimator but you can now also Twitter to calculate the fare. Write your query in plain English (see example), send it to @WhatTheFare and the bot will let you know the approximate fare for your ride in less than a minute.
@WhatTheFare is a new Twitter bot that will help you estimate the cost of your Uber trip. You’ll get to know the fare as well the different types of Uber taxis that are available on that route. And you can use the bot to estimate fare for trips anywhere in the world where Uber service is available.

The bot’s response will also include a deep-link (see example) to Uber’s mobile website and it will directly populate the pickup/drop-off co-ordinates should you decide to book a taxi with Uber.
You can use the bot from anywhere in the world but the Uber prices are always provided in the currency of the pickup/drop-off address. Here’re some sample tweets that used the @WhatTheFare bot to know Uber prices.

Internally, like DearAssistant, the Uber bot is also written with Google Scripts.
It uses the Google Maps API to geocode postal addresses found in your tweet request, fetches the list of Uber taxis available for that route via the official Uber API and then tweets the response using the Twitter API. The taxis icons in the tweet are standard Unicode emojis supported by Twitter.

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