Community Connect by NETBY

Inspiration

Yves' love for his grandmother warmed our hearts Yves - My grandma is my inspiration as I love her with all of my heart and it truly pains me to see her face this problem.

What it does

This app uses a voice activation platform to schedule and connect a community of volunteers with elderly people, fostering assistance and companionship.

How we built it

We built the MVP by using Expo to create a cross-platform app where elders submit location-tagged assistance requests that are automatically categorized via OpenAI GPT and then sorted by proximity for volunteers to see and accept. We used the platform expo.dev and ChatGPT as a guide to build the app. We also used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create a markup of the chat user interface that stores and sends back information. We used veed.io to create a demo of what the speech-to-text integration would look like.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered challenges with switching to a supported OpenAI endpoint for accurate AI categorization, handling voice recognition limitations and location permissions in Expo, and ensuring robust global state management across the app. We also tried to integrate voice recording into the mvp field but due to system capabilities we failed

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to come up with an idea we all love and that we were able to show how it would work. We also are proud of overcoming some hardships and integrating AI into the code.

What we learned

We learned how to utilize our resources and collaborate with each other during this short, stressful window.

What's next for Community Connect by NETBY

We plan to expand Community Connect into new regions, further enhance accessibility features (such as multilingual support and a simplified interface), and forge broader partnerships—both locally and with larger organizations. By doing so, we aim to reach more older adults, reduce loneliness on a larger scale, and provide meaningful volunteer opportunities for teens and community members across diverse communities.