EcoSpeaks

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  Home Page

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  Emission Calculator Input

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  Emission Calculator Trend Statistics

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  Enviro-NewsDigest chatbot (GPT-4 powered)

Inspiration

Climate change is a global challenge affecting everyone, with natural disasters striking more frequently and unpredictably. Staying informed about environmental news amidst a busy lifestyle is crucial but often difficult. Additionally, understanding personal environmental impact is vital for making meaningful lifestyle changes. This inspired the creation of Ecospeaks—a platform designed to provide easily digestible environmental news summaries and help users understand their carbon footprint. Ecospeaks aims to make environmental awareness accessible and actionable for everyone.

What it does

Ecospeaks features two main functions that combines education and empowerment, making it easier for individuals to stay updated on environmental issues and take steps toward a more sustainable lifestyle.:

1. Environ-News Digest asks users to provide a keyword related to the environment, and generates concise summaries of the latest news articles on that topic. It also creates engaging quizzes based on these summaries to help users stay informed and challenged.

2. Emissions Calculator: This tool allows users to calculate their carbon footprint based on their diet, transportation habits, and other lifestyle choices. It provides actionable insights to help users reduce their environmental impact.

How we built it

The NewsAPI searches for real-time news with the user's keyword in the news title and returns the articles and short summaries to the system and are displayed on the chatbot interface. With regards to generating quiz questions and evaluating user's quiz answers, we used some prompt engineering techniques to fine tune the responses from the Azure OpenAI GPT-4 model that was accessed via our API key and required credentials.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to access the recommended tier of Azure Cosmos DB with our free accounts. Hence, we were not able to use it in our product. As per our published product, we took some time to explore different prompt engineering techniques such as providing one-shot prompting and answering templates for the chatbot assistant to reply. This is to ensure that the chatbot responses will be more consistent in all its communications with the user.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are glad that the chatbot is able to provide the desired consistent responses according to our fine-tuned system prompts.

What we learned

We learnt some useful prompt engineering techniques and the different capabilities of the Azure OpenAI models.

What's next for EcoSpeaks

Moving forward, Ecospeaks could be developed to be store the articles in vector databases to improve search time for relevant and better quality articles.

Built With

• azureopenai
• newsapi
• streamlit