New2Canada App

We know that moving to a new country can be overwhelming. Have issues adapting to Canada? New2Canada connects you to AI chatbots specialized in different aspects of life - from healthcare to jobs.

Comment

Inspiration

After 2 years of long distance, Yufei (Faye) was able to come over to Canada as a visitor from China and in December 2023, she became a permanent resident. Throughout her time as a newcomer in Canada, she faced significant challenges adapting to life in Canada, despite Irvin's support. This made us realize how difficult the experience can be for newcomers who don't have someone to guide them. That's why we created New2Canada - an app that provides meaningful support and guidance to newcomers in Canada, who are often among the most vulnerable populations.

What it does

New2Canada is an AI-powered chatbot app that helps newcomers navigate everyday life in Canada with confidence. This app offers personalized guidance, local resources and practical tools to make settling in easier, faster and less overwhelming.

How we built it

New2Canada leverages Google Gemini's 2.5 flash model to power our chatbot. The frontend utilizes HTML with JS and CSS while the backend was built with Flask and Python. Our web app is deployed on Render.com and then connected to our custom domain provided by Tech Domains.

Challenges we ran into

EVERYTHING WAS A CHALLENGE. As newbies with some python and html experience, we had to figure out alot of things such as connecting gemini to our app, realizing flask isn't something you drink from, and trying to figure out how to go from our github repo to our tech domain website (turns out you need to do something called deployment :/). Shoutout to stack exchange and Claude AI!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we built a functional website that doesn't look like it's from the early 90s and with a functional chatbot that actually uses user data to curate its output!

What we learned

How to make a web app from scratch and then deploy it onto the internet! Also learned how to use JS and CSS to make things look nice. Finally, we learnt how to integrate a LLM into our app!

What's next for New2Canada App

Better UI/UX especially for the chatbot.

Share this project:

Updates