UTD Buddy

Inspiration

As UTD students, we find ourselves jumping between websites and apps to gather basic campus information. We were inspired by the idea of combining a campus bulletin board and a desk buddy into one centralized, AI-powered companion. Have a question about UTD? Ask Tobor!

What it does

UTD Buddy is an AI-powered campus companion built for UT Dallas Students.

Your Tobor companion collects all the information that can be found from multiple UTD websites and brings it into one place. Students can ask questions about campus events, check availability of classrooms, explore clubs, and get instant AI-powered answers all in a single app.

Your UTD Buddy will live on your desktop - rolling back and forth. When clicked the UTD Buddy interacts with the user and provides real, up-to-date answers about UTD based on a prompt given by the user.

How we built it

We built UTD Buddy using Google Antigravity as our primary development environment.

On the backend, we used Python and FastAPI to create a server that connects Google's Gemini API for AI-powered natural language responses and Nebula Labs API for real, up-to-date UTD campus data. Using RAG we allowed Gemini to answer student questions using the data from Nebula.

For the frontend, we used Godot Engine to bring Tobor to life as a fully animated and interactive desktop companion that moves across a transparent screen and changes expressions from time to time.

Challenges we ran into

Connecting Gemini to Nebula Labs: Trial and error with learning how to implement the seperate APIs led to difficulty in connecting Gemini and Nebula.
Getting Nebula Labs and Gemini APIs to work
Representation of the thought bubbles

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of bringing Tobor to life using Godot Engine making the Tobor feel like a real desktop companion rather than just an app. On the technical side, we successfully got both the Gemini API and Nebula Labs API working independently before combining them so that the Gemini and Nebula can communicate and produce UTD-specific AI responses.

What we learned

How to implement APIs from scratch
How to work with both AI APIs and data APIs and make them work together
How to use Godot Engine to build an interactive user interface

What's next for AlisonDionellaEricJayden

"Other?" prompt - expanding Tobor's conversational abilities so that students can ask free-form campus questions
UTD Campus Map - an interactive live map showing where events are happening in real time
Personalization - students can customize their experience based on their profile