Me, An Empath

Ever been confused by a text message with hidden emotional undertones? Me, An Empath is designed to help you read-in-between the lines in text messages and craft the perfect response.

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Inspiration

Digital communication through emails and instant messaging is taking up more and more of our time. But when navigating the digital space, it’s harder to tell how the other person is feeling behind their words. We might be anxious that we’re missing the real meaning behind an email, or a text.

What it does

Our hack is a conversational assistant called Me, An Empath. With the help of OpenAI, it analyzes written text, tells you what the emotion behind it might be, and offers some helpful suggestions for how to respond.

You can give the app a text message from any relationship of yours – a friend, a neighbour, a significant other, a coworker – and it will tell you what the emotion behind it might be, plus offer some helpful suggestions for how to respond! It also allows you to directly copy the prompts given in order to reuse them in your given situation. You can also hover over “learn more” to learn why the generated prompt was given.

Lastly, with the help of the Colormind API to generate colour schemes, we've applied a dynamic colour scheme based around the current mood, to give users a more fun and intuitive experience.

How we built it

We built it using JavaScript, HTML/CSS, React, and Bootstrap, as well as the OpenAI API and Colormind API.

Challenges we ran into

We had some challenges with merge conflicts messing up our work when we were all trying to change things! – Next time, we'll probably try to make more use of branches. We are also new to hackathons, so working with code on such a large scale was intimidating, but a great learning experience!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a working web-app that we can actually use in day-to-day life to better our communication with loved ones!

What we learned

We used Figma to prototype the application, which was the first time for all of us! We also learned how to make requests to web APIs and incorporate it into a React project, and this project was a great opportunity to refresh our JavaScript async/await skills.

What's next for Me, An Empath

Adding more suggested responses and improving the phrasings of the responses. It would also be really cool and more accessible if you could set your preferred typing style such as all-lowercase, or text-speak, to more seamlessly integrate with users' texting experience. We also think animations would add to the visual aspect. For added accessibility, we could add keyboard shortcuts, text-enlargement, and translation features so users are not restricted to just English.

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