Inspiration
We were inspired to create a tool to help users find possible vacation destinations based on their preferences as we ourselves struggled with deciding and finding a vacation spot this summer for our friend group.
What it does
Journify is an application that personalizes your travel-planning experience. Users can describe the conditions for their desired vacation, and our app gives them potential destinations that fit their desires! Furthermore, users can explore the different attractions each destination has to offer, from popular restaurants to beautiful parks. We know that creating a day-by-day schedule for a vacation takes lots of effort; lucky for you, our app does that for you! Based on the attractions you like, our website uses AI to generate a tailored itinerary for you based on your desired length of vacation and the attractions you wish to visit.
How we built it
We built the frontend for Journify using React.js, HTML, and CSS. The backend, which handles Yelp and Cohere API calls and AI text generation, was built using Flask, a python web framework. We store user account information and preferences with Google Firebase.
Challenges we ran into
Since we called the Cohere API, we had to be explicit with our prompts, and we had to incorporate the user’s actions into the prompt that we engineered. At first, we had trouble getting the desired results to display on the frontend because our prompts were not specific enough or not worded properly. Additionally, it was challenging to parse results from our API calls into the desired format(eg. JSON object) so that our frontend could display it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of mostly finishing our idea as we thought it was a good idea, but that it'd be difficult considering the level of overhead and difficulties that we were bound to approach. Mostly, we are proud of how we worked together and communicated with each other efficiently, despite how tired we were, to deliver a product.
What we learned
We learned alot throughout this process about how companies and products leverage AI tools to help create solutions, as well as how to use technologies such as flask, python, and axios to create a cohesive web application. We also learned alot about APIs and how to use them in our web application.
What's next for Journify
Although we worked really hard on this project this weekend, we plan on adding some features that we didn't get the opportunity to finish, as well as designing our website to be more visually appealing. Some new features we want to add are the ability to like multiple posts and to create itineraries specifically based on liked activities, as well as the feature to like posts and to permanently keep them in a user's "liked" page.
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