Inspiration This project was inspired by watching friends and family—especially immigrant parents and first-gen students—struggle to understand complex forms like FAFSA, lease agreements, and school enrollment papers. These forms are often written in dense, overly formal language that even native English speakers find confusing. The stakes are high, and the systems unforgiving. I wanted to build something that could quietly level the playing field—a kind of "quiet justice" for people who don’t speak fluent “form-ese.”
🧠 What I Learned Working on this project taught me a lot about the intersection of language accessibility, AI, and social equity. I dove deep into natural language processing, multilingual translation, and explored how to responsibly automate tasks that require high accuracy and trust. I also learned how to balance building a useful tool while preserving the privacy and dignity of users.
🛠️ How I Built It Frontend: A simple, user-friendly file upload interface and browser extension that allows users to submit documents like PDFs, scans, or screenshots of forms.
Backend:
Translation Layer: Uses OCR to extract text from images and PDFs, then applies GPT-4 and translation APIs to convert bureaucratic language into plain English, Spanish, or other supported languages.
Voice Agent Feature: I added a feature where an AI-powered voice agent can call on the user's behalf—whether it’s a landlord, school, or government office—based on the information they provide.
Privacy-first Design: All data is encrypted and never stored without consent.
😅 Challenges Language Accuracy: Translating formal legal or institutional language into something both accurate and accessible—especially across multiple languages—was tricky.
AI Voice Trustworthiness: Ensuring the AI voice was not just technically functional, but also empathetic and trustworthy in high-stakes situations.
File Handling: Supporting a wide range of form types (images, scans, PDFs, etc.) required integrating robust OCR and pre-processing workflows.
User Trust: Since the product handles sensitive personal documents, I had to prioritize security and transparency every step of the way.
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