debAIDe

Inspiration

We referenced how people enjoy playing on Chess.com, and the competitive element to it was applicable to many fields. In addition, it is often common to see people pointlessly arguing on social media, without proper moderation, and often unwarranted. It is clear that people need an avenue to argue, but it would also be good to be able to concurrently improve their argumentation and logical reasoning skills. Thus, we believe that a debating app, similar to Chess.com app, would be able to bring people of opposing views together, to come to possible resolutions. We aimed to create a mobile app so it would be accessible and usable for the average person.

What it does

Our debating app, debAIDe, pairs individuals of similar debating skill, and assigns each individual with a stand to defend. Individuals will then take turns proposing arguments and countering their opponent’s arguments, and an AI judge will determine a winner. The winner will have an increase in rating, and the loser will be given advice on how to improve their arguments.

How we built it

For our frontend, we used React Native (Expo) using Expo AV to record audio, Zustand for global state management, React Query to fetch and cache data, and TypeScript for type-safe development. For our backend, we used FastAPI, PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, Google Gemini AI (for scoring), Whisper for speech-to-text transcription, and Uvicorn for our server.

Challenges we ran into

The toughest challenge was actually coming up with a good idea. Our society is constantly filled with problems that we would love to solve, so we wanted to create something that would benefit society while also making sure to use AI meaningfully.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a mobile app was a challenge for us, as we were not very experienced in app development, and had to learn a lot in our creation process. We are proud that we created a fully-functional mobile app that looks and works well.

What we learned

We learned how to send information to be processed by Gemini, and to curate our prompts to ensure proper output formats. We also learned how to create an app that stored data from different users, and that could coordinate between different users concurrently.

What's next for debAIDe

We are considering more interesting formats, such as 2v2, clan battles or even “battle royale”. We are also considering moving into educational mode, where the user can directly pick apart arguments with fallacies.