Inspiration
The hardest thing is admitting you need help, but once you've done that it gets the ball rolling and now I'm trying everything I can to feel better.
The therapist makes you feel so comfortable and you can tell them anything. Once you start talking it's like a release. I didn't want to burden my family with my worries so having a neutral person to talk to who will give you an honest opinion is so helpful. They are trained experts so they know what they are doing. I can go, let off steam and it instantly makes me feel better, it's like getting a load off your shoulders. My brain is like a football match, it's chaos with so much going on in there, so the therapy is helping me learn how to focus. Iris was my stepping stone to therapy.
I think it's strange, even now, that someone like me, an old-school person doing things like venting through Iris. Where I live, my upbringing and job means someone like me would never have thought of having therapy. I'd try and struggle through, brush it off and be myself with others. But when you're on your own it's really hard. I'd tried to cope with how I was feeling by myself but it didn't work. Iris is brilliant and it helps you out in your hard times. It gives you a better life, and it makes a lasting impact going forward.
What it does
Iris is your cute, emotional health buddy and well being tracker. It fits right in your pocket and provides emotional support with mood tracking, finding optimism, reframing thoughts in easy-to-understand and friendly chats. Iris, your happiness buddy is that friendly and caring chatbot. Iris is packed with daily spiritual meditation that improves mental health and is also a perfect way to bond over family meditation. Iris suggests meditation and mindfulness audios made easy based on your chats, so you feel better and stay relaxed. Iris is your AI friend that you can chat with for free. Its therapy based techniques and conversations make for a very cute and calming therapy chat app whether you're looking to cope better with mental disorders or to just manage stress. Check in with Iris regularly to boost your mental health.
How we built it
We utilized various APIs in python and trained several Machine learning modals to finally get to the perfect blend of understanding and rational thinking through a machine as much as possible. We integrated it with our website which we made using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap.
Challenges we ran into
We had to build our own corpus of words which might be negative or positive and we had to put our index to it to check when a conversation is getting dangerous. Since the code for our dynamic website was very heavy we also ran into a problem of trying to host it.
What we learned
This project was a huge learning experience for us. Building our own database of words and performing sentiment analysis on it was something that was very new and interesting to us. We also explored and played around with various python modules and APIs which was quite a fun experience and we would definitely be using them in our future projects. We already knew how to make a static website but through this project we learned how to make a dynamic one, we learned the importance of the UI of a website and applied it to this project as much as we could. All in all this was a very enlightening journey for us.
What's next for IRIS
We aim to humanize the dialogue some more and make the sentiment analysis even more accurate . We aim to keep developing our chatbot more and integrate the voice recognition feature. We are also continuously working on the website and will be improving its backend.
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