Inspiration
Every day, numerous individuals, including ourselves, receive a plethora of emails. We frequently find ourselves sifting through this abundance, trying to identify emails with crucial information, those needing a response, and those of lesser importance. But what if there existed an automated solution for this? Well, that's where our project, Email Insight, comes in.
What it does
Our program operates by users logging in to our webpage with their Google accounts. Our AI will then extract their emails, summarizes them, and rank them from the most crucial to the least important. Finally, it presents these emails on our webpage in a neat and prioritized order, with the most important ones at the top.
How we built it
To develop our project, we began by utilizing Google Cloud's Authentication and API to enable users to log in using their Gmail accounts. We then retrieved their emails and utilized Google Cloud Functions in conjunction with Cohere's API to summarize and rank these emails from most crucial to least important. Finally, we presented the emails in a user-friendly format on our React webpage.
Challenges we ran into
Our main challenge arose when we attempted to use Google Cloud for the first time. Initially, we saw an advantage in developing our web app without a backend, relying solely on Cloud Functions to host our AI code. However, we encountered numerous Network Errors while trying to upload user emails to the cloud, which we later identified as CORS errors. After hours of troubleshooting, we reached a point where we were close to giving up and not submitting our project. Fortunately, with the help of the Hack the North mentors, we managed to overcome this issue and successfully fix this issue.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The achievement that brings our team the most pride is our collaborative success in building an app. Initially, we had doubts about our ability to complete the project, fearing we might abandon it halfway. However, whenever one of us encountered an error or challenge, we started brainstorming solutions and would review each other's code, resulting in the resolution of numerous issues.
What we learned
Hack the North was the first hackathon for all of us on the team. This shared first-time experience led us to brainstorm ambitious ideas, only to realize that they aren't feasible, and that we should be prioritizing simplicity and usefulness above all else for our project.
What's next for Email Insight
Email Insight was developed within in less than 24 hours, signifying it is by far in it's early stages relative to our envisioned potential. In the future, we hope implementing various enhancements. These include crafting a Chrome extension that prioritizes emails based on their subject lines' significance, and creating a mobile application, which will notify you at your chosen daily time, presenting summarized and prioritized emails from the previous 24 hours within the app.
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