Athyna

Athyna

Inspiration

The inspiration for Athyna came from a universal frustration: browser tab overload during research. We've all been there – twenty tabs open, jumping between sources, gathering valuable information only to return days later with no recollection of what we found or which site contained that perfect insight. We wanted to build a tool that transforms scattered research sessions into organized, persistent knowledge that remains accessible over time.

What it does

Athyna is a research companion that transforms how you search, organize, and retain knowledge.

Using Tavily's API, Athyna searches the web and delivers focused results without the need to open multiple tabs.
The app analyzes your research topic and generates insightful follow-up questions using Gemini AI, helping you dive deeper into topics you might not have considered.
When you return to a research topic, Athyna provides a comprehensive summary of your previous sessions to help solidify your understanding.
The system uses vector embeddings to correlate every follow-up question, ensuring users stay on a similar research track and maintain contextual relevance throughout their exploration.

How we built it

NextJS for frontend
TailwindCSS for styling
SupaBase for database
Gemini and TavilyAI for intelligent web searching and follow-up questions.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was that two out of our four teammates were new to web dev and this was their first hackathon. We also were low on experience as a whole as only one of our teammates was a seasoned web developer and the rest were still new to this experience. Finding a way to interrelate questions between nodes was the most challenging part as we did not have much experience with that either . Another challenge was tuning the AI to generate genuinely insightful follow-up questions rather than obvious or repetitive ones required extensive prompting optimization.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even though we were quite a rookie team, we're proud of the progress we made in the past 36 hours. A lot of the frontend and design was contributed by our first-time hackathoners, which was great. This is an app that solves a major problem faced by students, and we're happy with the fact that we could pull this off within the given time limit.

What we learned

We've learned a lot from this hackathon. We started from scratch, were able to help our first-timers, and our experienced teammate made understanding things a lot easier.

What's next for Athyna

Because this app solves a serious issue we all face, we are going to try our best to refine the app so people at a larger scale can use it. There's not much investment that goes into it, and it's a really fun project to continue working on as students!