Meridian

calendar
dashboard
itinerary
homepage

Inspiration

Some of the best memories I've made during my time in college were with my friends at weirdest locations imaginable. The problem with this, however, is that its impossible to get a group chat to agree on plans. There's always the person who's eager to get it done, and the guy who doesn't read the chat asking for a summary. There's the guy that works night shifts, and the guy that doesn't want to spend more than $5 on an outing. Having a streamlined platform where your messages can be read and converted into plans is something that our group would personally use in our circles to improve our quality of life!

What it does

Meridian reads the messages within a discord group chat and uses that information to help resolve conflicts, develop an itinerary, and monitor bookings for the group. Schedules don't line up? Meridian can handle that. Too lazy to do research? Meridian isn't. Can't find flight timings? Meridian tries. Meridian creates polls to gauge interest and keeps the group chat updated on the current state of affairs, forcing plans to meet fruition.

How we built it

The app we developed revolves around a discord bot that funnels data to a next.js application to meet the project specifications. Under the hood, the app uses a Prisma database and Claude API to store data and make decisions. When triggered, an agent will read the chat history up to a certain point to ascertain the general context and extract individual preferences/availability. After a few rounds of suggestions and possible itineraries, another "negotiator" agent is deployed to iron out conflicts and create compromises. Subsequently, a booking agent and calendar agent are deployed to make the itinerary come to life and add the plan to a group calendar. An agent runs in the background to monitor any last minute changes and cancellations that may affect the state of the plans.

Challenges we ran into

While building Meridian, one of the challenges we ran into was managing state. Since the itinerary is a changing document that updates every time someone suggests something new or accepts/denies a suggestion, keeping the UI consistent without stale renders or race conditions took a lot more work than expected. We also had a little bit of trouble with deployment, specifically with getting all the authentication and database working in the production environment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Something that we're proud of is getting multiple AI agents to actually work together, coordinating a message scraper/analyzer and a trip planner together. It took many more iterations than we expected, and we're happy that we were able to put it together without having the pipeline get stuck halfway through!

What we learned

We learned how to use MongoDB, as well as learning to be better prompt engineers.

What's next for Meridian

Our platform currently supports scraping messages and planning trips from Discord. In the future, we would like to add this to iMessage or other messaging platforms (Whatsapp, WeChat, etc). We would also like to incorporate weather information from OpenWeather so the AI agents can make more informed decisions for travel plans (e.g. flagging rainy days, suggesting indoor alternatives, finding best days for outdoor activities).