Inspiration
Since elementary school, I have had a close friend who is partially blind. Despite their disability, they have always been bright and ambitious. One of their dreams is to pursue massage therapy and start a small business. However, their vision impairment has created fear that they cannot interact with others effortlessly, impacting their ability to achieve future success.
In addition, over 70% of working-age adults with significant vision loss are not employed full-time, and 27.7% of them live below the poverty line.
These factors motivated me to create BizVision, a novel AI-driven solution that utilizes computer vision to make social interactions easier, increase employment opportunities, and encourage blind people to start small businesses.
What it does
BizVision is an AI computer vision assistant for visually impaired business owners. Our AI assistant describes customers' facial expressions and appearances, allowing the business owner to better communicate and understand customers' needs. In addition, I fine-tuned the Gemini AI language model, ensuring it produces accurate and desired content for blind people.
BizVision performs 3 main functions:
- real-time detection of customers to improve social interactions
- theft detection and safety enhancements (detects environmental disasters/potential dangers)
- inventory management and payment handling
How we built it
The frontend of BizVision is built using React.js and Tailwind.css to create a clean and minimalistic user interface. The backend is implemented using Flask to handle our API endpoints and Python for interacting with Google Gemini AI. Twilio API supports emergency contact when the business owner is in danger, and Stripe API handles payments through the cart.
Teck Stack Front End: React.js, Tailwind.css Back End: Python, Flask APIs: Google Gemini API, Twilio API, Stripe API
Challenges we ran into
Integrating the Stripe Payment system was a significant challenge since it was my first time implementing a payment system into my web app. Figuring out every detail from the frontend to the backend server requests was tough, but eventually, I managed to complete it successfully.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Combining so many new technologies in a short time was no easy feat. This project was a culmination of grueling work, and finishing it in time is something I am immensely proud of. This was my first time participating solo in a hackathon, and there was a lot of learning and self-motivation involved in getting through everything.
What we learned
Generative AI is very powerful and can benefit society, including visually impaired people and many other disabled people. I also learned to fine-tune an AI model.
What's next for BizVision
We plan to add login authentication and a database for inventory. Our goal is to make a real impact by getting actual users, starting from my community. BizVision aims to be a user-friendly and intuitive tool, making starting and managing small businesses accessible for blind people.
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