Grannever

Inspiration

Mankind has always strived for eternal life. While we have yet to find answers to many fundamental and ethical questions before eternal life can become reality, humans struggle to take farewell of their deceased ones. If you have lost a friend or family member, Grannever helps you overcome the grief.

What it does

Based on transcripts of recordings of your deceased friend or family member, our natural language processing engine creates a virtual avatar that is able to imitate the deceased person, telling stories of his or her life in the person's style of speaking. Through a chat interface you can connect and interact to the virtual avatar.

How I built it

We started by using Recast AI to build the user interface for our system, the chatbot. It should recognize intents of the person it's talking to like "Tell me a story about *". This intent should then be followed by a call to our rest backend which gets the asked question to determine some keywords which can be compared to the database where the abstraction of our recored audio files should be. To fill the database the system takes transcripted audio as an input and uses the IBM Watson API to split it up in keyword called entities which are then stored in a MariaDB. As the backend technology we used JavaScript combinend with the Express-Framework and Node.JS.

Challenges I ran into

We had trouble setting up the database because it was configured to a charset that doesn't support all the german characters. Also we had to set up an extra domain for our backend because the chatbot from Recast AI required a HTTPS connection.