Inspiration
When my family first came to the United States, we were confronted with a difficult-to-navigate immigration system. With our limited proficiency in English, it was a struggle for us to prepare for citizenship interviews and to understand all the legal documents throughout the naturalization process.
Adam and I believe sought to use language models to solve these unique struggles for first-generation immigrants.
What it does
We built Citizenly, an app that helps immigrants navigate the naturalization process:
As of now, you can do two things in Citizenly.
- Practice for your citizenship interview
Citizenly will simulate an immigration officer asking you questions for your naturalization test. It'll grade your responses and tell you if you passed. You'll get instant feedback.
- Ask questions to an automated legal consultant
Citizenly will answer your questions about legal documents. Scan a document that's been giving you trouble, and ask any questions to Citizenly that you have about it. It'll answer your questions in your native language.
How we built it
We linked up an iOS frontend interface (Swift) to a Next.js backend calling OpenAI and Pinecone APIs.
Challenges we ran into
We had some trouble uploading PDF documents at first to Pinecone. We discovered that instead of doing image to PDF conversion, we could just scan the image and extract the text. We then uploaded this text to Pinecone, allowing us to link OpenAI to a vector database.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of linking together new technologies that we haven't worked with before. We weren't sure if we would be able to integrate Pinecone effectively because of our lack of experience with vector databases, but we're glad that we were successful with that integration.
What we learned
We learned a lot about the immigration system. We were surprised by the incredible quantity of legal documents that describe every part of the naturalization process (e.g. USCIS guidelines, citizenship test requirements, etc.). One fact that was astounding was that over one-third of Americans would fail the naturalization test!
What's next for Citizenly
Interviews and document interpretation are just the start. We are planning on developing an end-to-end immigration tool that will guide anyone through the process in any country.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.