Whispers

Whispers is an app to help the user reflect on their emotions by talking with Whisper the cat!

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Inspiration

With many people's stressful, fast-paced lives, there is not always time for reflection and understanding of our feelings. Journaling is a powerful way to help reflect but it can often be not only overwhelming to start on a blank page, but hard to figure out even what to write. We were inspired to provide the user with prompts and questions to give them a starting point for their reflection. In addition, we created features that summarized the user's thoughts into a short blurb to help them contextualize and reflect on their day and emotions.

What it does

Whispers is an app that aims to help the user talk about and decipher their emotions by talking with Whisper, the app mascot, as the adorable cat prompts you with questions about your day in an effort to help you reflect and sum up your emotions. Through the use of randomly generated prompts, Whispers collects your responses to create a summary of your day and tries to help you figure out what emotions you are feeling.

How we built it

The back-end was developed with Node.js libraries and the Co:here API to collect the user-inputted data and summarize it. Furthermore, the classify functionality from Co:here was used to conduct sentiment analysis on the user's inputs to determine the general emotions of their answers

The front-end was developed with React-native and UX designs from Figma. Express.js was used as middleware to connect the front-end to back-end.

Challenges we ran into

Overall, we did not run into any new challenges when it comes to development. We had issues with debugging and connecting the front-end to the back-end. There was also trouble with resolving dependencies both within back--end and conducting requests from front-end for analysis. We resolved this using Express.js as a simple, easy-to-use middleware. In addition, we had trouble translating some of our UI elements to the front-end. To resolve this, we used both online resources and re-adjusted our scope.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the model that was made for our backend which was trained on a massive dataset to summarize the user's thoughts and emotions. Additionally, we are proud of the chat feature that prompts the user with questions as they go along and our overall UI design. Our team worked hard on this challenging project.

What we learned

We learned a lot about front-end development and adjusting our scope as we go along. This helped us learn to resolve problems efficiently and quickly. We also learned a lot while working with our backend of how to train Co:here models and connect both the front-end and back-end and perform requests to the server.

What's next for Whispers

We would like to continue to develop Whispers with several more features. The first would be a user authentication and login system so that it could be used across several platforms and users. Additionally, we would like to add voice-to-text functionality to our chat journaling feature to improve on the accessibility of our app. Lastly, we would like to expand on the archive functions so that users can go back further than just the current week and see their journals and emotions from previous weeks or months

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