Inspiration
Oftentimes, when looking to pick up a new hobby or new activity of any sort, we run into issues with time, budget, planning, and it gets to difficult to begin. Hobby Genie changes that by giving you a structured approach to any acitivity near you!
What it does
HobbyGenie is a chat web app that checks your calendar and finds activities near you. HobbyGenie does all three in one conversation:
- Sign in with Google account
- You land directly in a chat interface.
- You share your Google Calendar (or just tell the bot when you're free).
- You give a zip code and optionally, a few preferences.
- The assistant cross-references your open time slots with nearby events and hobbies and returns a filterable list.
How it functions
- Auth: Google OAuth login gives us identity plus (with consent) calendar read access.
- Conversational interface: A chat UI is the front door for the whole experience. The assistant asks clarifying questions ("Any other preferences?") and falls back to sensible defaults (popular local activities) if the user doesn't answer.
- Availability: If the user grants calendar access, we pull free/busy blocks from the Google Calendar API and render them on-page. If that integration isn't ready in time, the assistant simply asks the user for their availability in natural language and reasons over the answer — same downstream result, lower-effort input path.
- Discovery: Zip code + preferences are sent to the eventbrite API to source nearby venues and events, which get merged with the user's free time windows into a ranked, filterable list (distance, category, time of day).
Challenges we ran into
Setting up and linking the Google OAuth to the Gemini LLM was quite difficult under the tight timeframe, but we were able to successfully do so with communication and helping eachother debug and code!
What's next for HobbyGenie
We want to add a feature that would allow friends to plan one activity. A user would generate an invite link for a specific plan. Friends who open it can add the event to their own calendar and (in a stretch version) contribute their own availability, so the app can suggest a time that works for the whole group rather than just the organizer. We also want to host the site on a domain to make it more accessible to users.
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