Anchor

Inspiration

We recognized a problem while talking to friends and realized that many people don’t show up to events simply because they don’t know anyone who's attending. We also noticed that socializing in classes becomes harder as you progress past freshman year. So, we created Anchor to help students drop the anchor and make the connection with someone new!

What it does

Anchor is a web and cross-platform mobile application that helps students connect with others who are attending the same events. It creates a profile for each student based on their interests using speech-to-text and AI tag generation, making the process quick and easy. Additionally, AI pulls class title tags, allowing students to easily customize their profiles. Using their profile, the app suggests events on the events page, and students can filter based on their preferences. They can then select an event and click "Find a Buddy" to get matched with someone they can go with. This matching process uses AI to assess compatibility based on profile tags (without using any personal information).

How we built it

For app development, we used:

Firebase Hosting
Flutter UI framework
VSCode
Gemini AI API
Dart
Speech-to-Text API
Google Generative AI package
And other API/Packages to build the app.

Challenges we ran into

One of our main challenges was trying to use Eleven Labs for speech-to-text due to its great model, but Flutter didn’t have extensive documentation on how to integrate it with its existing audio web packages. This made implementation difficult, so we switched to an alternative package, Flutter's Speech-to-Text API. We also struggled with narrowing down our idea. Initially, it was very broad, but we eventually focused on matching students for on-campus events due to safety concerns with students creating their own events.

Accomplishments we’re proud of

Despite having another event on the same day and a late start, we were able to put together a solid project that we are proud of. We also learned a lot about AI, app development, and how to address real-world problems.