Donna AI

Dashboard
Calendar
Notifications
Maps

Inspiration

The modern professional constantly battles meeting fatigue and missed deadlines, a universal struggle stemming from packed schedules. This led to a simple, powerful thought: "I wish I had someone like Donna Paulsen from Suits to intuitively manage my workload." Donna AI was born from the need to replicate her unparalleled foresight and efficiency.

What it does

Donna AI is your highly efficient, low-cost executive assistant. It transforms the chaos of a busy schedule into a proactive, optimized workflow:

Intelligent Timetabling: Manages and optimizes your calendar, ensuring you have the time you need for both meetings and preparation.

Automated Communication: Drafts and sends professional, context-aware emails on your behalf.

Proactive Reminders: Delivers targeted, hourly reminders for upcoming meetings and critical events, ensuring you are always on time and prepared.

Donna AI offers all the indispensable management of a personal secretary, but with the scalability and cost-efficiency of cutting-edge AI.

How we built it

The front-end interface was built using a standard foundation of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, enhanced by the dynamic capabilities of the React framework for a responsive and modern user experience.

We integrated several key third-party services:

Google Maps API: Used to implement a fully functional map, likely for location tracking related to meetings or time-to-travel calculations.

TalkJS: Integrated to handle real-time messaging or communication features within the application.

Challenges we ran into

Our primary hurdles involved connecting sophisticated external services:

Gemini API Integration: While we successfully integrated the core Gemini API functionality, connecting its output robustly and reliably to our React frontend proved to be a significant challenge, requiring extensive debugging and troubleshooting.

Google Calendar API Permissions: We faced difficulties establishing the necessary authorization and permissions to securely access and manage user calendars, a roadblock we ran into due to the complexity of OAuth scopes and time constraints.

Frontend-Backend Sync: Ensuring smooth, continuous communication and data synchronization between our client-side (React) and server-side components required more effort than initially scoped.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the setbacks, we delivered several key milestones:

Multi-API Implementation: Successfully integrating and showcasing two distinct, complex APIs (Google Maps and TalkJS/Gemini) into a single web application within a limited timeframe.

Functional Calendar System: Built a fully operational timetabling calendar from scratch, demonstrating the core functionality of schedule management.

Map Utility: Implemented a fully functional map utilizing the Google Maps API, a strong visual element that adds potential for location-based scheduling features.

What we learned

The development process was a deep dive into API management:

Gemini API: We gained invaluable hands-on experience with the Gemini API, learning its architecture and potential, even through the challenges of implementation. This knowledge is crucial for future development.

Integration Complexity: We solidified our understanding that the most significant learning curve often lies not in using an API, but in the complex, secure, and performant integration between the frontend, backend, and external services.

What's next for Donna AI

Our roadmap for Donna AI focuses on achieving true, comprehensive executive assistance:

Full Communication Suite: Implementing core features for sending emails and booking meetings directly through the AI.

Proactive Engagement: Integrating speech recognition to put Donna AI "on standby," allowing the user to simply say "Hey Donna" to activate her for immediate commands and queries.

Voice and Call Management: Developing the capability to take and screen calls and process voice commands for a seamless, hands-free experience.