My Virtual Companion

App logo
Main Menu of the App
Friends List
Settings
User Profile
Group Photo

Inspiration

Some groups of people may have social isolation as they may be staying alone or refuse to speak to people due to mental issues such as depression. The social isolation can apply to anyone of various age groups, from young people to the elderly. Some of these groups may have other pre-existing conditions like dementia for the elderly, which social isolation can worsen their mental well-being further.

What it does

The Virtual Companion Social Media
A mobile app that has a main virtual avatar that serves as a companion to the user, such that the app allows the user to interact with avatar at any time. In addition, the platform allows users to connect with other users of the platform, such that the virtual avatars can make friends with other avatars.

Features:

Conversational Virtual Companion
Connect other users
Analytics of Connections' Movements
Personal Bio page

1. Conversational Virtual Companion:
Users can choose a variety of avatars as their preferred companion, and they can change the companions at any time. The avatars comprised of common animals such as a penguin, dog, cat and duck. Users are able to converse with the companions through speech, while the companions will reply through text. Research has shown that talking to pets help in improving one's mental conditions. Users can also feed the companion daily and interact with the companion through touch commands, to allow for more intimate interaction. The food will be replenished daily. The text reply will be based on a pre-trained NLP model of a common corpus of conversation replies. Over time, the model will take in inputs of the user and improve the model, so that the conversation can be improved.

2. Connect with Other Users:
Users can connect with other fellow users of the platform through a unique user identifier. This allows the users to interact with their connections through their companions, with actions such as sending gift and daily greetings, that allow users to exchange positive words such as for encouragement and praise. Unique identifier will be generated at random and allows users to easily identify one another. Daily exchange of gifts and greetings allow fellow users to send positivity.

3. Analytics of Connections' Movements in the App:
Users can use the app to see recent movements of other connections like in their interactive activities with the companions, such as the feeding and the touch commands interactions. The app will track the physical activity of the user, so that in the event of emergency like the user had a fall, the app can notify his/her connections through the analytics activity.

4. Personal Bio page:
A page to contain basic information of the user, which includes the name, email address and user identifier. We try to collect as little information as possible.Put a disclaimer that the companion is not for real life.

How we built it

We build an application using godot which runs gdscript.

Challenges we ran into

Most of our members do not have background in godot/gdscript. Hence, we have a rough start for this project. Also, we tried to implement speech to text features into our application using godot but it wasn't as easy as it seems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are able to come out with a prototype and show the important features that we want to present.
Exploring new things together like familiarising gdscript and the syntax.
Designing our own custom sprites and logo for the application.