PayHere

Empowering Transactions, Redefining Convenience

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Inspiration

As Singapore moves towards being cashless, there are groups of people who are not as technologically-savvy, and are slipping through the cracks. Our team believes that we, as a society, have to uplift these people in order to achieve our goals as a Smart Nation. Therefore, we decided to embark on a project to empower users who are not familiar with cashless payments, especially the elderly, with a seamless, secure and accessible solution.

We are driven by the idea of redefining convenience, transforming the way people shop, travel, and interact. Every line of code, every innovation, is a step towards creating a world where electronic transactions are a bridge, not a barrier.

What it Does

PayHere revolutionizes cashless payment for consumers, especially the seniors, by providing convenient payments to nearest merchants via location. It provides a seamless experience for users with its voice recognition and text-to-speech functions, along with a friendly user-interface to help assimilate new users into adopting cashless transactions, enhancing their consumer lifestyles.

How We Built it

We built our MVP on React with Vite. We also used the Geolocation API to get the location of the business for storage in the database, speech-to-text and text-to-speech libraries for speech recognition and TailwindCSS to style our front-end.

Challenges We Faced

  1. We suffered a huge blow to our team strength due to members being put out of commission (sick).
  2. Initially, we were unable to find a way to get the application to make payments via QR code scanning, so we decided to switch to money transfer via UEN number.
  3. We suffered from food coma due to the delicious food provided, which tremendously slowed down our work output.

Accomplishments that We're Proud of

  1. Users can find nearest merchants based on their live location
  2. We managed to create the voice recognition function to allow users to give verbal commands when making payments.
  3. Speech-to-text function worked!

What we Learnt

We have learnt that despite being students, we have the ability to make change and impact the world via innovation. Every aspect of the project, from code development to forging partnerships, is aligned with the overarching goal of reshaping the way financial transactions occur. By creating an environment where transactions become seamless and efficient for everyone indiscriminately, we can create a future that redefines how commerce works and empowers lives.

What's next for PayHere

PayHere aims to further enhance users' experiences by gradually introducing more features as the users start to get more accustomed to the platform. We aim to integrate Apple and GooglePay into our wallets, use OpenAI to better match business names to nearby merchants and use Stripe's API to facilitate payments.

Furthermore, the voice recognition function will also support the detection of different languages and dialects commonly used in Singapore, especially amongst the seniors. Users' frequent purchases and favourite merchants are kept track of, which will then be used for personalized recommendations for future considerations. We will also be developing spending limit for user protection, as well as platforms for customer service, in case our users have any inquiries or require help for troubleshooting.

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