Racoone

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project came from one our team members avid shopping addiction and desire to make the online shopping process more pleasant for the consumer while also allowing the business to benefit through review analytics for certain factors which would provide direct feedback to companies for areas of improvement. #coolstorybro

What it does

Racoone operates as a search engine intended to filter through reviews of a website for inputted keywords. Based on a desired keyword of a factor directly affecting consumers (ex: price, material quality, sustainability etc). From the reviews featuring those keywords, an AI provides a summary of reviews involving those keywords to send back feedback to the company regarding consumers' opinions of the direct product.

How we built it

Our planning take the form of a 4 part process with each group member taking on a designated part to form the project:

Server API
Webscraping
Gbt API
Web Extension/ Front end design

We build a cromium extension on the front-end get user data. Which sends the data to a server using our very own REST api. The first part of the build process involved our teammember Camille searching and creating a server to host our extension. Our other team member Myra was responsible for creating a program which from a website URL and specific keyword would web scrape using Python in order to obtain sentences containing the keyword ideally running 50 characters forward and back and sort them out into lists. From that our teammate Risham was responsible for sending that information to an open AI in order for the lists to be summarized and a general summary report provided for businesses. Python was used to take the list of strings and send them to the Gbt which then summarized the information and returned a summary. Finally our teammate Hazin was responsible for the design and front end of the app and our certified team beautician. He designed and created the layout and UI for the extension which was intended to be simple and easy to use.

Challenges we ran into

Overcoming certain learning curves and barriers was the biggest challenge, especially for 2 team members who had less of a technical background, particularly with programming but nonetheless, we all persevered and helped each other out according to our strengths to create a fantastic product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the fact - we were able to create a minimally viable product - where every required component was built & works in under 36 hours.

What we learned

Some people shouldn't drink 3 red bulls & 2 coffees - or else you have a really sick party at 3 am and a horrible crash the morning after. #gettinglit

Another thing learned through this experience is the value of utilizing our resources available to assist with creating the final project and brainstorming. The sponsor companies as well as team members and organizers were extremely helpful in helping us flush out ideas and sort out minor issues and the exterior perspective was really helpful in getting to our final product.

Technical skills wise, integrating rest API in Python and using API's as a beginner programmer were some of the skills learned as well as webscraping

What's next for Racoone

With more love and affection, Racoone has the potential to morph from a very basic search extension which can only provide feedback for a single keyword to a chrome extension capable of providing a thorough feedback report on multiple keywords at a time. Additionally, Racoone can be used for websites outside of Amazon. Racoone is also due for a glow-up and deserves to look like the modern superstar that she is and while the hackathon is just the birth of this extraordinary extension, there is more work to be done design-wise to give Racoone a more aesthetically pleasing look. Racoone has brought a group of strangers together to create a product none of us could have imagined and has set a foundation for us to go out and continue to create and be open to learning and we thank her for her service.