Elevate

Inspiration

Elevate came as a revelation almost. There's always been the option for people struggling to visit a therapist, or seek a medical consultation. But this doctor-patient dynamic often leaves people feeling alone, trapped in solitary suffering. It made sense to bring people together. So we thought to tend to the wounds by making a platform where people join as anonymous stars, each star having its own story, and together making up a beautiful universe strung together by the melodies of human voices.

What it does

People can upload one "star" a day, an audio note containing their story for the day: perhaps its something the user was struggling with but overcame, perhaps a reassuring thought, or maybe a sprinkle of kindness which may help another star elsewhere in the universe. We make sure that the audios don't contain malicious or harmful content. With the audio, they can also choose a tag to add to their post, like #anxiety or #burnout. Once the audio has been approved, people can explore the universe freely! There are also galaxies of stars which belong to the same tag, giving users a nice way to navigate their way around. Track the dashboard for a daily log of personal audio notes!

How we built it

The backend logic is on supabase, having set-up policies, edge functions, webhooks and cron functions. We use MediaRecorder API to record voice notes, and send them to AssemblyAI speech-to-text for transcription, then send this test to KoalaAI for text moderation, with resourceful methods in place. We used react-p5 to style the canvas, and make sure to render stars and galaxies dynamically. The beauty is in the simplicity - a simple app with a profound purpose.

Challenges we ran into

Frontend design was a very tough challenge for us, since we all come from a backend engineering background (also being students!). We knew that the user experience had to be the biggest selling point, as if the user doesn't feel welcome, then we've failed our mission. We were also new to supabase, so learning it was quite an experience. And being the first time working on a shared development for some, it helped us improve our teamwork and apply better practices. But most importantly of all, we realised the importance of planning, as we went 24hrs into the hackathon without any idea, but we trusted the process and happy with our creation!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest accomplishment is making this platform of course! It was such an exciting project for us all, and we maintained great team dynamics and rapport while building it out, staying up late at night to fix bugs, and waking up early to get developing again! We're proud of the UI we managed to deliver, and getting the chance to interact with solar (credits to him for not being part of the team yet being a great motivator throughout the whole journey, being there for the vibes!)

Make sure to find our biggest accomplishment! (clue, it's hidden somewhere on the Dashboard page...)

What we learned

The skills we required were diverse. Some teammates were fully new to react and javascript, none of us had used supabase, and we went in with no idea of what to make. But over the course of the hackathon, we learned frameworks, we picked up a modern BaaS, improved our Git version control, and most importantly we learnt to maintain good vibes :D

What's next for Elevate

We could make the UI better, and create a more immersive experience for people. If people resonate with our idea, it would be amazing to create a mobile app too, reaching out to more people around the world. Elevate has truly elevated us, and we can't wait for it to elevate us even more!

P.S. Stay tuned :)

Built With

• assemblyai
• bootstrap
• hugging-face
• javascript
• koalaai
• react
• react-p5
• render
• sql
• supabase