aitinerary

AItinerary home page

Inspiration

Planning trips kinda suck. There's a lot of unproductive discussions and at times it seems impossible for anyone to make a decision on anything. Our group can personally attest to the struggles of planning trips as we probably spent more time talking about the 6 hour drive to Oklahoma than we did actually driving to the location. As such, we wanted to create tool where you can still have fun planning trips with your friends without the stress and annoyance that comes with it.

What it does

There are a couple of key features that our application has that dramatically improves the planning experience. Most of the features such as the recommendation system are aimed at reducing mental overhead and decision fatigue from the endless options that are available when you travel. Other features such as the real-time collaborative environment and scrapbook albums are designed to foster a lively and fun environment.

How we built it

There were a lot of different systems that went into this project. From the generative AI side, to the vector searching, to the CRUD operations between the frontend and backend. Each person in our group worked on an individual aspect of this project and we integrated all the systems at the end.

Challenges we ran into

There were plenty of challenges that we ran into, especially some of the newer technology such as with the vector embedding and recommendation aspects. Additionally, our group decided to experiment with new authentication tools and backend features that took some time to understand and fully organize. On the frontend-side our group wanted a more bespoke experience in regards to interacting with our application, so we made custom components that were aimed at creating a smoother experience. That being said, it was also incredibly challenging rolling out al these frontend features especially as the project got larger resulting in our group rolling out some quick fixes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're incredibly proud of our project and the challenges we overcame. We came in with the goal of learning and building something awesome and we believe that we were able to accomplish that goal and more.

What we learned

There were a lot of lessons learned both in terms of the niche technical details like how to create embeddings, but also larger design choices such as how we organized our project that we will be taking away with us.

What's next for aitinerary

There's definitely a lot of potential for the idea and we were only able to scratch the surface of what we believe Aitinerary can truly become. We hope to continue developing more advanced features as well as contribute to the overall robustness and consistency of a user's experience even after the hackathon. There are people that we personally know that would love to be able to use this application, so we do plan on rolling it out for the general public!