Liora, Your Financial Co-Pilot

Inspiration

Our journey with Liora began with a simple question: "What is the biggest source of stress for people our age?" While many answers surfaced, a recurring theme was anxiety surrounding money.

We observed that financial literacy is a massive barrier for many, especially students and young professionals. The world of finance is often filled with intimidating jargon and complex systems, leaving people feeling overwhelmed and powerless.

Initially, our team explored the idea of an emotional support assistant. However, we quickly realized that a primary root of this widespread anxiety was a lack of financial education. We were inspired to pivot: instead of just treating the symptom (stress), we wanted to tackle the cause.

What it does

Liora is an AI-powered financial co-pilot designed to make financial literacy accessible, non-judgmental, and engaging.

It functions as a conversational assistant that allows users to ask financial questions. Liora breaks down complex topics—like budgeting, saving, understanding debt, or even basic investment concepts—into simple, easy-to-understand answers.

Born from an initial idea for a general emotional support bot, Liora pivoted to tackle the root of a major source of financial stress: a lack of education.

How we built it

Before writing a single line of code, we defined our project's identity. The character of "Liora" was designed entirely from scratch using just pencil and paper and then Adobe Photoshop, giving our project a unique, friendly, and approachable face. Then we build the user interface as a responsive web application, making it accessible on both desktop and mobile devices. We used Visual Studio Code as our primary IDE, building the app with core web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. A robust back-end server acts as the project's brain. It manages user session logic and, most importantly, integrates with a powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) API. This allows Liora to understand the intent of a user's question and pull the correct educational response.

Challenges we ran into

Finance is a sensitive and high-stakes topic. We faced a constant challenge in crafting responses that were simple enough for a beginner to understand but did not sacrifice accuracy. We had to be extremely careful to provide education, not prescriptive financial advice.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designing Liora from a blank canvas in paper and then in Photoshop is a major accomplishment for us. It gives the project a unique identity that we built entirely ourselves, setting it apart from other projects that use generic templates.

What we learned

This project solidified our skills across the entire development stack: from creative design (Photoshop), to front-end (HTML/CSS/JS), to database management (SQL Server).