Inspiration
We came up with the idea through suffering panic attacks, with the personal experience that talking to someone we trust can help prevent or alleviate the symptoms. We wanted a way to connect a distressed user to someone they trust, in as simple and friction-less a way as possible.
What it does
@everyone is a simple application in which a user can input the contact details of their close friends and family members. These people must accept an optional link which is generated and sent to their SMS (to prevent spam calling and misuse of our app). When the user has their contact base set up, if they are distressed and need to talk to someone they can press the @everyone button. This calls everyone at once, from the user's @everyone phone number. As soon as someone picks up, all the other calls are terminated. This means that the user will have connected to someone they trust while only having to press one button, instead of having to scroll through their contacts and ring people sequentially in the midst of a panic attack or other distressing situation.
How we built it
We used Ruby on Rails to make our project, and Twilio for the call/SMS APIs. We used Gemini for the LLM integration, and Zed as our primary development environment.
Challenges we ran into
Learning Rails was a new hurdle for most of the members in our group and it took us some time to acquaint ourselves with this style of programming and building. Navigating Twilio was also a challenge, and it turned out to have higher fees than we expected, meaning that we had to curb some of our initially planned features because they would simply be infeasible at scale. We wanted our product to be actually viable and not just a proof-of-concept, so budgeting concerns were unfortunately a very real issue.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're very proud of adjusting to two mostly unfamiliar technologies for the purpose of this project, namely Zed and Ruby on Rails. Learning these was challenging, but really fun and rewarding and a good number of our team have been converted to Zed users from here on out! We're also proud of delivering our product, and particularly with an (if we do say so ourselves) beautiful front-end. We wanted our product to be calming to use and we feel we achieved this from a UI perspective.
What we learned
Beyond the aforementioned learnings in Ruby on Rails and Zed, we found working on this project a great learning experience in attempting to make an ethically minded service application feasible from a release standpoint. Our service costs money (albeit not much) to run, so we should have considered how to generate this money from the off. We didn't want to make this a for-profit service, but we left considering how to keep this viable at scale till quite late in discussions, meaning we had to rework a lot of our material in order for it to be releasable!
What's next for @everyone
We would like to expand this to include greater SMS functionality, particularly to give people who have been called a text message explaining the situation has been resolved, after someone else picks up. This would be reassuring and would give our product better viability. We would like to properly deploy this shortly after the hackathon so it can be accessed by anyone and actually used!
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