Inspiration
Did you know that millions of women face emotional, financial, and social struggles when dealing with infertility? The journey is tough, but support can make all the difference.
We witnessed firsthand the emotional and financial toll of this experience and recognized the lack of accessible and affordable mental health support. We believe that AI can play a crucial role in providing personalized and empathetic guidance to women on their fertility journeys.
By combining the power of AI with empathetic design, we aim to empower women on their fertility journeys and provide a much-needed support system.
What it does
We developed a Telegram bot, "Coach Nia," powered by Gemini, to offer daily support and encouragement to women facing the challenges of infertility.
Our solution is an AI-powered infertility support coach—a always-available coach that provides daily encouragement and resources for women facing infertility. Whether they’re exploring IVF, other treatments, or taking a different approach, coach Nia is here to uplift, offer information, and reduce the isolation that often accompanies this journey.
How we built it
Our solution leverages Gemini's advanced language capabilities to provide personalized advice, motivational quotes, practical tips, and - most important - an empathic experience for the end-users. In addition, to enhance the user experience, we integrated HeyGen to create an AI avatar of Coach Nia, allowing her to send video messages and foster a more engaging connection with our users. We also created and integrated PDF templates that enable users to track their progress, print daily journal pages, and engage in mindfulness exercises, enhancing their digital experience with tangible, reflective practices.
In technical terms:
- Backend
- Node.js
- Hosted on GCP Cloud Run Function
- Gemini pro and flash
- Google Docs API
- HeyGen for video of Coach Nia
- Telegram API
- App
- Telegram Bot
Challenges we ran into
Here are the top 3 challenges we ran into:
1 - Prompting
Finding the right prompts that allowed Gemini to have a flawless conversation with the user, without losing context when iterating on certain topics several times.
2 - Balancing authentic support while being transparent about the AI-powered nature of coach Nia
One significant challenge was striking a balance between providing authentic support and maintaining transparency about the AI-powered nature of Coach Nia. We addressed this by clearly communicating the bot's limitations and emphasizing its role as a supportive tool, rather than a replacement for human interaction. Additionally, we focused on designing the interactions to be empathetic and informative, while avoiding any claims of sentience or human-like understanding.
3 - Handling multiple conversation process flow in parallel
When we started enhancing our coach, we realised that sometimes certain conversation process flows would happen in parallel, and interrupt each other, leading to logic breaks in the conversation with the end user.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our biggest accomplishment: learning from past mistakes. In the past we build solutions in search of a problem.
But the problem is what's most important. And the only way to understand it is to get to know the people who have it. So based on our personal experience, and INTENSIVE reddit research, we identified infertility and the lack of affordable support for women as a big problem.
That’s why we’re most proud of 2 things:
- Actually starting with a problem and then building the solution, and not vice versa ;-)
- Not over-engineering the perfect solution (Mickael was eager to deploy a standalone mobile app to replace telegram, but we decided to really go MVP this time first...)
What we learned
Through extensive research in the /r/infertility and /r/IVF subreddit, we gained invaluable insights into the multifaceted challenges faced by women and families undergoing infertility treatments.
We discovered that mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, and stress, are prevalent among this population. Additionally, the exorbitant costs associated with IVF treatments, coupled with potential health risks and job insecurity, can exacerbate emotional distress.
Social isolation and a lack of understanding from others further compound these challenges. By understanding these issues, we were able to tailor our AI coach to provide targeted support and address the specific needs of this community.
What's next for Coach Nia
NOVEMBER (Thanksgiving Holidays)
Our immediate goal is to refine Coach Nia through closed beta testing with a select group of 20 users. This will allow us to gather valuable feedback and make necessary improvements to the user experience.
DECEMBER
- Mobile App: Develop a mobile and web app to broaden the reach of Coach Nia and offer a more seamless user experience, and tackle data privacy issues by hosting our own database.
- Add more Journal PDF templates: Continuously add new templates, worksheets, and interactive features to provide a comprehensive support system.
- Foster Community: Based on our Reddit research, a lot of women are looking for support groups, so we want to find a way to integrate that experience into our platform.
By pursuing these initiatives, we aim to create a powerful and supportive platform that empowers women on their fertility journeys.
Built With
- firebase
- gcp
- gemini
- generative-ai
- google-cloud
- google-cloud-run
- google-cloud-task
- google-docs
- google-gemini
- heygen
- telegram
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