Mr. Wonderful Life

What it does

Mr. Wonderful Life uses the tough love of Kevin O'Leary to help you make smarter financial decisions. Using data available from KnotAPI, the app displays your entire transaction history at the level of individual products. In addition to data like item, vendor, and price, you can hear personalized advice from Mr. Wonderful himself on potential alternative purchases. In the chat mode, you can ask any financial question you can think of as well as hearing an overall evaluation of your history. Finally, the quests page helps you set smarter goals to save money in the future.

How we built it

Mr. Wonderful Life is primarily built with an Expo frontend and a Firebase backend. Transaction data is stored in Firestore and it goes through several APIs throughout it's lifecycle to categorize them, find alternative options, and generate recommendation messages. The frontend UI was designed in Figma and includes every screen within two presses as well as a realistic Kevin O'Leary head to talk to!

Challenges we ran into

There were many challenges in getting the whole app to function correctly. One of the first roadblocks was working with the Gemini API, since we would often get 503s or have our functions fail to deploy. After we resolved this, we ran into some challenges with our Expo UI, since our navbar was extremely nonstandard. Getting personalized recommendations required testing out several APIs to figure out the best way to locate nearby restaurants. A final challenge was extracting decibel values from the audio stream to animate Kevin O'Leary in real time, which required finding surprisingly obscure API references.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely happy with the quality of the responses and the voice. Almost every time you add a transaction or ask a question the responses are in character and funny. We're also very happy with how the UI turned out, mixing a clean base with a fun layer on top in the O'Leary nav.

What we learned

This was one of our first times working with several of the technologies in the stack. Particularly, none of us have a lot of experience with Expo and we're all much more comfortable with the flow now. This was also our first times using ElevenLabs to generate audio of a real person, though the setup and integration was very smooth.

What's next for Mr. Wonderful Life

We'd love to keep working on this app and to build out the usefulness as a real product. We're also hoping Mr. Wonderful himself will see the result.

Built With

• ai
• elevenlabs
• expo.io
• firebase
• gemini
• google-maps
• knot