Aethel

Aethel Brain diagram
Trust Lenses diagram
Membership & Auth diagram

Aethel

What it does

Aethel helps people understand official messages and letters that are confusing or stressful. You can highlight any text or paste in a letter. Aethel explains what it actually says, checks for scams, points out your rights, and helps you draft a reply or practice a phone call. It is made for anyone who feels stuck or alone when official messages show up. Aethel finds the intention, the possibility of it lying, the confidence, the manipulation tactics, etc.

How we built it

We're a duo student team. The project is personal. I (Yan) moved to Cyprus as an immigrant, and I used to explain official letters in foreign language to my parents. I know exactly who we are building for. We made Aethel on nights and weekends; my friend and I both had an exam week. We decided that instead of using an API for speed, we would build our own engine from scratch. We wanted to try and build an actual AI, not just a gpt wrapper. It reads the letter, picks out the important details, and explains everything in plain words using only facts it can quote straight from your document. Because it's all ours and doesn't rely on any outside service, it runs right on your device, works offline, and never stores your information. Privacy mattered to us because people paste their most stressful, personal letters into this, and that should stay theirs. We used Vercel and Supabase for deployment while developing with our own ML knowledge and support from Claude Code and Gemini.

Challanges we ran into

The hardest part was actually building our own AI and not just wrapping a company’s model and calling it ours. Doing it took a lot longer than we thought, having to improve it minutes before uploading the project. We also spent a ton of time making sure the tool never made up facts and always showed where the info came from. We had to skip flashy features and focus on what actually helps people.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that Aethel runs privately on your device, never makes things up, and lets you practice tough conversations. It really helps people when they are stressed or scared, not just in a demo. We built our own system of engines, an NLG, an NLP, a brain, a classifier (important), etc. We have also been able to maintain a nice design, sketched beforehand.

What we learned

We learned how to actually build AI instead of just using API keys as we used to do. We learned that privacy matters, and that a responsible AI tool should refuse to do things that are risky or misleading. We learned to cut hard and focus on what really helps people. We learned how to do better time management and how to work in a team together, which I (Yan) believe was essential for us to actually complete the prokect. We also had no idea how to classify different texts into different classes for later on analysis, so we had to do research and eventually learn many new things.

What's next for Aethel

We want to make Aethel something real that people can rely on, not just a hackathon project. To do that, we need support and funding. Next, we want to add more languages, handle more document types, build a voice mode, request a Chrome app extension, and make it super easy for any community to set up. Our goal is for anyone, not just people who can pay for help, to feel confident instead of scared.