Jotter

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Inspiration

Do you ever have an absolutely amazing thought but end up forgetting it? Or do you go to jot it down, only to spend more time figuring out which folder of which note-taking app to put it in?

We have so many thoughts going through our heads all the time, especially in today's fast-paced, distraction-filled world: what groceries to buy, and what homework we need to do, and what pick up line to use on that cute girl at work.

Many of these great ideas go forgotten. Even when we do remember to jot down our ideas, it usually ends up getting lost and forgotten in the mess of our other notes.

Introducing Jotter: a way to quickly jot down your thoughts and organize them for you so you never have to worry about forgetting anything ever again.

What it does

Jotter is the new, revolutionary AI tool that will change the game in the art of recalling. People get so swamped with their daily tasks from homework for students to meetings for working adults that we never have time to slow down in this fast paced society, preventing us from remembering our brilliant ideas or problematic issues that we face in our day to day lives. These ideas and issues we face are all potential opportunities to innovate and create something that will make our lives easier. As coders, we love to innovate off of any small inefficiency and create a solution, but yet, we can’t even recall these issues we faced from the day. Thus, Jotter will categorize all your daily thoughts from daily tasks to long term goals to simply notes and ideas. We utilize Cohere generative AI to sort anything that you quickly jot down on Jotter to place your thought in the proper category, leading to an organized, streamlined database of your notes that can be easily accessed and looked back on. Furthermore, to sprinkle some happiness into our users’ lives and help remember our notes later, Jotter uses generative AI technology to include humorous and/or wholesome suggestions related to your note. The power of AI can truly increase our creativity and efficiency, and Jotter takes this power, bringing it to its maximum capabilities.

How we built it

In this project, we utilized Svetle for the front-end with the Material UI Component library and Tailwind CSS for styling while using python in the back-end with various APIs. We endured a painstaking engineering process. We challenged ourselves by going out of our comfort zones through discovering more about full stack development, utilizing svelte, python, cohere API, Fast API, and tailwind. We experimented with animations and UI components to develop an aesthetic front end that we could be proud of to complement our expansive back end development. Furthermore, through our full utilization of GitHub and intensive collaboration through branching and merging, we worked as a singular unit to develop this app.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges that we ran into was learning to work in new technologies that some of us have never studied before. Although it can be difficult to adapt and sometimes efficiently distribute work, we were able to pick up speed and recognize how to truly divide and conquer as a team. We learned to make sure to help each other and reach out more when in need, providing a successful communication that helped us overcome the variety of technical challenges we encountered from integrating the front-end to back-end. Through this, we were able to learn so much from each other and truly learn how to effectively communicate as a team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were very proud of our idea. Even though it took us over 12 hours to finalize our project idea, we made sure to consider all aspects before diving into the project and executing it. Our patience and discipline, although it was difficult to continue discussing, is something that we were able to recognize as extremely valuable. Furthermore, our execution of the project is something we all saw beauty in. We were amazed how 4 people that did not know each other beforehand were able to effectively and openly communicate their ideas and concerns in order to create a well-mannered discussion. We all found this to be a great learning experience both in soft-skills and technical skills and look forward to staying connected! Furthermore, we explored the domains of prompt engineering in generative AI prompts. Through continuously refining our generative AI prompts and categories, we were able to consider many edge cases—namely notes that may fall under none of the categories—requiring us to put ourselves in the user’s shoes. We all are very proud to say that Jotter does a stellar job of categorizing in a practical manner for any note you could think of.

What we learned

A well-thought out prompt can make an enormous difference when it comes to using generative AI. Through our experience of testing all the edge cases, we were able to see the extremity and vast differences that prompts can make in the response. Whether it was ensuring the humor for our suggestions weren’t too dark nor too bland, or simply making sure we got the right format in the prompt’s answer, spending hours creating the best prompt paid large dividends. Furthermore, something that all of us took away revolved around not just new found technical skills in AI and blockchain, but also collaborative skills in compensating and offering a helping hand to each other. We were able to fill in for each other’s weaknesses, working together like a succinct, well-oiled machine. Thus, we discovered a new side of ourselves within each other, providing us experiences that will last us our life-time.

What's next for Jotter

Jotter is already an extremely powerful tool that revolutionizes the way that we recall our tasks, goals, and ideas; however, we still have room to expand and flourish into more. Imagine the future where you can have your entire life transcribed, summarized, and semantically searched. This is exactly what we are thinking with Jotter. By accessing one’s microphone on their phone, we intend to utilize audio information and voice recognition in order to expand our horizons by creating a transcribing dictaphone running 24/7, letting you have notes on your entire day, month, even life that can be summarized and searched to recall anything you need. The potential this has for people with Alzheimer's to simply allow people to recall and cherish even the small moments in their lives would be such a meaningful and impactful tool that is not only practical, but also very sentimental. These are the aspirations for Jotter, and we are excited to continue revolutionizing recall!