college_assistant

"Stop drowning in group chats. Your AI reads everything and tells you only what matters"

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Inspiration

Every college student knows the feeling — 47 unread messages in the class Telegram group, a deadline you missed because it was buried in chat, and a calendar you never update. We've all been there. We built College Assistant because college life is chaotic. Students are juggling academics, internships, fests, freelancing, and social life — all coordinated through noisy group chats. The inspiration was simple: what if your AI assistant could sit in your group chats and manage your life for you?

What It Does

College Assistant is an AI-powered personal assistant built specifically for college students. It:

Monitors Telegram groups and automatically detects deadlines, exam dates, cancelled classes, and professor announcements Saves deadlines to Google Calendar automatically — no manual entry ever Filters noise — ignores "anyone coming to canteen?" but alerts you instantly for important messages Sends a daily morning summary at 8am with today's deadlines and upcoming events Responds to natural language — ask "what's due this week?" and get an instant answer Chains multiple actions — "I have a project meeting tomorrow at 3pm" saves it to calendar automatically

How We Built It

AI Brain — Amazon Nova We used Amazon Nova via AWS Bedrock as the core intelligence. Nova handles natural language understanding, tool calling, and decides which action to take for each message. Tool Calling Architecture We built a custom tool calling system where Nova can call real Python functions:

create_calendar_event → saves to Google Calendar get_upcoming_events → fetches calendar events get_daily_summary → generates morning briefing is_important_message → filters group chat noise

Telegram Bot

Built using python-telegram-bot library. The bot sits in college groups, reads every message, passes it through Nova's intelligence layer, and takes action automatically. Backend Python + FastAPI with conversation memory that maintains context across the entire chat session. Integrations

Amazon Bedrock (Nova) for AI Google Calendar API for scheduling Telegram Bot API for messaging

##Challenges We Ran Into AWS Authentication was the first major hurdle — navigating IAM roles, regions, and credential setup took significant time as a beginner. Google OAuth was surprisingly complex — redirect URIs, consent screens, and token management required multiple attempts to get right. WhatsApp limitations — we originally planned WhatsApp integration but discovered it violates Terms of Service. We pivoted to Telegram which has an official API. Telegram Privacy Mode — by default Telegram bots can't read group messages. Discovering and fixing this cost us debugging time. Async Python — building the Telegram bot required understanding async/await patterns which was completely new territory.

##Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Built a fully working end-to-end AI assistant from scratch as a beginner in under 2 weeks Real integrations — not a demo, actual Google Calendar events get created Smart filtering — Nova correctly identifies important messages vs noise with high accuracy The moment a Telegram message saying "DBMS assignment due March 25th" automatically appeared in Google Calendar — that felt magical! Learned AWS, Google Cloud, Telegram API, and async Python all in one project

##What We Learned

Amazon Nova tool calling — how AI can decide which function to call based on natural language API integration — connecting multiple real-world services together Async programming — how Python handles multiple tasks simultaneously OAuth authentication — how secure login flows work Prompt engineering — how to write prompts that make Nova return structured JSON reliably Most importantly — how to debug when things break (and they always break! )

What's Next for College Assistant

Short term:

Deploy to cloud so bot runs 24/7 without laptop Add internship tracker — track applications and follow-ups Add fest and event management Voice interface using Amazon Nova Sonic

Long term:

Expand beyond Telegram to other platforms Smart study schedule generator based on deadlines Peer collaboration features for group projects Support for multiple colleges and departments Mobile app with full dashboard

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