I’m trying out the new Chatbot feature. I have two chatbots. One of them works great. And the other one doesn’t work, but I feel like it should. I work with a school. The school has an unofficial carpool program where parents fill out a carpool form to be added to the carpool database. The database contains the parent’s name, student’s name, home address, the campus the student goes to (there are five), and latitude and longitude coordinates to go along with the home address. All of this information is in a Google Sheet that syncs with a Zapier Table. When someone opens up the chatbot they are prompted to enter their home address, followed by the campus the student goes to. What’s supposed to happen is the chatbot will look through the Zapier table to find any parent addresses that are within 5 miles of the address the parent just entered AND goes to the same school that the parent just entered (both criteria are important). I have very clear directive instructions that include what the chatbot response should be if there are any matches or aren’t any matches. If there are matches, it should return the parent name, student name, address, distance (this is the distance from the address the parent entered into the chatbot and the match in the database), and a Google Maps link to the match’s address. What I’m finding is that it will return results, but they are never correct. It might pull someone’s information from the Zapier Table but the address will be 25 miles from the address the parent entered into the chatbot. My question is there a way to get a Zapier Chatbot to accurately figure out the locations of each person in the Zapier Table and then figure out the distances from those points to the address the parent entered and then filter by the school? I tried doing this with ChatGPT 4o and it worked. So I know the GPT 4o model can do it. Is it possible Zapier has some sort of limitation that is preventing it from accurately making this calculation?
How do I fix inaccurate Zapier Chatbot location matching in a school carpool system?
+11- Community Manager
Hi
Sorry to see no one’s responded here yet. That said, I did some checking and can see you also reached out to our Support team and who confirmed that table analysis and geo-mapping are not supported functionalities for chatbots which is why it’s not working. It seems they also suggested an alternative of using a Zapier Interfaces form to get the user’s input, and using a Zap that has ChatGPT and Table actions to create an workflow that sends the matching records to the users via email. That sounds like a great alternative to me and looks like they’ve been providing further assistance to you in getting that workaround set up! 🙂
If you have any follow-up questions on that it would be best to continue the conversation with the Support team directly over email as they’ll have more context and have access to your Zaps. But if there’s anything else I can assist with in the meantime please do let me know!
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