Gita Jar

Feeling anxious or angry? Find timeless wisdom from the shlokas of Bhagavad Gita that help you manage your emotions better.

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Inspiration

I often refer to the wisdom of ancient texts when I feel anxious or angry, and it is an immense help in feeling better. I recently came across a neat physical product in the form of Gita Jar with verses from the Bhagwad Gita stored as chits color coded to certain emotions, and you pick up a chit to read based on the emotion you're feeling. I wanted to bring the same experience to the digital realm with native apps on iOS and Android, so that this wisdom can be accessible to many more people and in many more places.

What it does

Gita Jar is heavily inspired by the physical ritual of drawing a colored chit from a jar. It lets you choose what your heart needs—calm, patience, clarity, connection, hope, courage, gratitude, or joy—and draw a thoughtfully selected verse. Each card includes the complete Sanskrit shloka, the English translation, a short illustrative story, and offline Sanskrit audio.

How we built it

We started with the raw idea and brainstormed with ChatGPT on all the features it would have and how to go about building it. It got a fairly accurate implementation of the iOS in the first go, which was very impressive. We just iterated a little bit on the finesse of how things looked and worked.

Once the iOS design was locked in, it was just a matter of asking Codex to port the implementation to Android. It did a phenomenal job of replicating the same behavior in Android with very few bugs, which were fixed in a couple of prompts.

The most interesting part of the project was figuring out how to do the text-to-speech for the Sanskrit shlokas. We felt this was an important feature to have because hearing the shloka said in the original Sanskrit would lead to a meaningful connection to the text. ChatGPT was a great help, from researching a suitable way to do it and helping evaluate the better model to use, to performing the entire offline generation of the audio.

Challenges we ran into

Generating the audio for the Sanskrit verses was fairly challenging and took a few iterations to get the quality where we needed it to be.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I went from never having developed any Android or iOS apps to building a deployable app within a few days with polished assets, and advanced features. It feels really good, and I will soon be publishing these apps to both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

What we learned

Being completely new to iOS and Android development, there was a lot of learning for me in terms of how to use the development environment. Here too, ChatGPT was a great help.

Additionally, the Sanskrit audio generation was very illuminating, although some more interesting projects were not usable here due to license constraints. ChatGPT research led me to some really interesting learnings about how models for this sort of text-to-speech generation are created and modified.

Creating the YouTube demo video for this was also a very important educational experience.

What's next for Gita Jar

I see this evolving into a family of similar apps that let users connect to ancient teachings and help them in their daily lives, improving their emotional well-being.

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