Ivee

Forget typing. Stories are best spoken, speak it and we'll write it.

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Inspiration

While video-calling his grandmother, Tianyun was captivated by her nostalgic tales from her youth in China. It struck him how many of these cherished stories, rich in culture and emotion, remain untold or fade away as time progresses due to barriers like time constraints, lack of documentation, and the predominance of oral traditions.

For many people, however, it can be challenging to find time to hear stories from their elders. Along with limited documentation, and accessibility issues, many of these stories are getting lost as time passes.

We believe these stories are valuable and deserve to be heard. That’s why we created a tool that provides people with a dedicated team to help preserve these stories and legacies.

What it does

Forget typing. Embrace voice. Our platform boasts a state-of-the-art Speech-To-Text interface. Leveraging cutting-edge LLM models combined with robust cloud infrastructures, we ensure swift and precise transcription. Whether your narration follows a structured storyline or meanders like a river, our bot Ivee skillfully crafts it into a beautiful, funny, or dramatic memoir.

How we built it

Our initial step was an in-depth two-hour user experience research session. After crafting user personas, we identified our target audience: those who yearn to be acknowledged and remembered.

The next phase involved rapid setup and library installations. The team then split: the backend engineer dived into fine-tuning custom language models and optimizing database frameworks, the frontend designer focused on user authentication, navigation, and overall app structure, and the design team commenced the meticulous work of wireframing and conceptualization.

After an intense 35-hour development sprint, Ivee came to life. The designers brought to life a theme of nature into the application, symbolizing each story as a leaf, a life's collective memories as trees, and cultural groves of forests. The frontend squad meticulously sculpted an immersive onboarding journey, integrating seamless interactions with the backend, and spotlighting the TTS and STT features. Meanwhile, the backend experts integrated technologies from our esteemed sponsors: Hume.ai, Intel Developer Cloud, and Zilliz Vector Database.

Our initial segregation into Frontend, Design, Marketing, and Backend teams soon blurred as we realized the essence of collaboration. Every decision, every tweak was a collective effort, echoing the voice of the entire team.

Challenges we ran into

Our foremost challenge was crafting an interface that exuded warmth, empathy, and familiarity, yet was technologically advanced. Through interactions with our relatives, we discovered overall negative sentiment toward AI, often stemming from dystopian portrayals in movies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our eureka moment was when we successfully demystified AI for our primary users. By employing intuitive metaphors and a user-centric design, we transformed AI from a daunting entity to an amiable ally. The intricate detailing in our design, the custom assets & themes, solving the challenges of optimizing 8 different APIs, and designing an intuitive & accessible onboarding experience are all highlights of our creativity.

What we learned

Our journey underscored the true value of user-centric design. Conventional design principles had to be recalibrated to resonate with our unique user base. We created an AI tool to empower humanity, to help inspire, share, and preserve stories, not just write them. It was a profound lesson in accessibility and the art of placing users at the heart of every design choice.

What's next for Ivee

The goal for Ivee was always to preserve important memories and moments in people's lives. Below are some really exciting features that our team would love to implement:

  • Reinforcement Learning on responses to fit your narration style
  • Rust to make everything faster
  • Multimodal storytelling. We want to include clips of the most emotion-fueled clips, on top of the stylized and colour-coded text, we want to revolutionize the way we interact with stories.
  • Custom handwriting for memoirs
  • Use your voice and read your story in your voice using custom voices

In the future, we hope to implement additional features like photos and videos, as well as sharing features to help families and communities grow forests together.

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