Lola: Your Community-Powered Garden Assistant

Lola is a community-powered AI gardening assistant who connects growers with expert knowledge and local networks, transforming anyone into a food producer and building resilient food systems.

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Inspiration

As an avid community gardener, granddaughter of Filipino sugar cane farmers, and a proud community supported agriculture partner with a small farm in Upstate New York, Em was inspired to build a project that supported one of the world's most pressing issues -- climate change and the effects on our food supply. Extreme weather events destroyed over $5 billion in crops last year alone. Meanwhile, food prices have surged 25% in two years, leaving millions struggling to put fresh produce on their tables. As supply chains fail and costs soar, communities are left vulnerable and disconnected from their food sources. With the help of her sustainability-minded partner, Casey, the two of them built a solution rooted in the old and the new -- community knowledge and AI assistance.

What it does

Lola bridges this gap by creating an intelligent community ecosystem where knowledge flows seamlessly between AI assistance and human expertise.

How we built it

Started with a short prompt on Bolt > Moved to developing a react-native/react mobile/web app > Deployed on Expo/Netlify

Challenges we ran into

Dealing with Hallucination
Bolt loved to hallucinate methods when using some third party libraries and public apis (sorry, Bolt team).

Changing priorities did not translate well with Bolt's tokens
As we discovered more about small farmers in the United States and challenges we're facing in our macro-food systems, our design and project focus shifted frequently. Rewriting some features were unexpectedly costly in tokens on Bolt's interface.

Designing for mobile responsiveness
While testing out functionality across web and mobile, we found that some features were functional on one platform but not the other.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Integrating with PlantNet
Their plant identification API does wonders!

Designing the Community Insights feature
We wanted to keep this app community first -- passing down generational knowledge is incredibly important in taking card of the land, and a feature typically passed over in the AgTech space. We're incredibly proud of integrating community knowledge in our AI assistant's knowledge base.

What we learned

-- Em
I learned how to build a deploy react native mobile apps, something I've never done before.

-- Casey
This was my first time using an AI web dev agent to create a full on app, which helped build prompt engineering skills.

What's next for Lola

  • Historical context Allow users to save their conversations, providing historical context for Lola's recommendations
  • Groups Expand to community gardens and small farms, allowing for team-based knowledge bases to integrate into Lola
  • Track plant progress Allow users to track plant progress through images and notes, furthering feeding into Community Insights to what works and what doesn't, which can be nuanced based on region, humidity, weather, etc.
  • Enable live chatbot Connect to LLM for live chatbot as this is a prototype
  • Sorted threads for Community posts Help users find the most useful comments and follow along conversations
  • AI-powered Community post summaries Help users understand the problem and solution at a glance at the top of every post

For the best experience, open http://lola.emsanity.com on your mobile web browser.

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