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Meera Homepage
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Meera - chat with her easily
Inspiration
When I talked to my female friends what is the most crucial challenge they face in their lives, the lightning fast response was "maintaining hygiene during that time of the month". Indeed maintaining hygiene is their biggest challenge. The world starts with you, if you are fit then nobody can stop you from conquering the world. During periods one might face health problems, which can lead to a disturb mind. But what if you can get a guide to assist what you should during the time you need the most help, won't that sort out most of the challenges?
What it does
Meera is an exceptional chatbot cum app that can help with your queries during that time of the month simultaneously preserving both privacy and anonymity. None of your data is stored on your servers, and we do not ask for anything not even your name. To give you age-appropriate advice we just ask your age group and the query you want to get addressed. In a few taps and clicks, you have your answers. It is not a heavy card-based dashboard which most modern apps have, so you don't get lost among which card or article to read for help. Just chat with Meera and it's as simple as that!
How we built it
We used React to build the app. To keep the app minimal (and faster development) we eliminated the use of any backend servers. Also, because we do not store any information we don't require a database for users. We used Co:here's LLM to predict the answers of a user's question from our custom answer's database. We use Vercel to host our app.
Challenges we ran into
One of the major challenges was to understand the use case, and gather some real feedback on it. I regularly asked out my friends to review the idea and we had to eliminate some features to preserve our principle of "anonymity and security". We went through feedback loops multiple times, to ensure the app has a USP - which is its so simple that even a 9 year old can use it. Other than this we got into some technological challenges as well, like while connecting Cohere's LLM (Large Language Model) to our chat app and dealing with Webpack breaking changes issue after they migrated from v4 to v5.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One of the major accomplishments we're proud of is that we could build such an app within two days. Being a full-time student I had 5 assignments to submit in the weekend, but I still managed to inch through the deadline. I gathered lots of feedbacks, some very much critical on the use case and it now has led me to think more clearly and better in the design procedure. I know understand much more about the domain than previously.
What we learned
There has been numerous technical stuff that we got to learn like I had never completed a React project as fast as this one, but also some learnings on the other front too. I now understand that user desirability is super important than even the technology behind it. The greatest technologies are not rated according to the complexity they involve but on the scale at which it creates impact.
What's next for Meera - helping women maintain hygeine
We would like to expand it's knowledge base and add more answers to other queries - i.e. making it more comprehensive. Plus, we are also planning to add mental health related queries too. We plan to bring a tracker feature in the app where it rates the sentiment of a query and tracks it if the mood improves or if not then it tries to soother the user with more supportive messages. Now this data would be maintained locally on the user's device and not on our servers to preserve privacy. PS. I am a very privacy conscious person!
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