Nod and Hope

Inspiration

Being in a new country is already hard enough. Our team has a multicultural background so we wanted to create an application that will help people of all different backgrounds wherever they are in the world, whatever language they speak, and understand whats being said and respond with confidence.

What it does

It helps people get through situations in a place they may not be fully comfortable with. The user can describe the situation, scan a letter or speak about it. It will list what to bring, how to preapre and suggest how the user should respond. It supports the 10 most spoken languages in the world and the user can choose the location they're in so the advice fits where they actually are.

How we built it

We used VS Code and CLaude AI to write the main part of the code and then we edited it and built from that starting point using GitHub.

Challenges we ran into

After testing we realised that everyone situation was being assumed that the person was in the UK, so we added another selection button to tailor the response to a specific place. This was really important to us as it was necessary for us that our application was accessible to all. Also, finding a voice that didn't sound too AI, we wanted it to be natural rather than robotic which took a lot of listening to different voices.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Integrated and worked really well as a team despite everyone being at different levels of experience with building applications and the tools involved. We're also proud that the app is built to be inclusive, it works across languages and adapts to where the user is.

What we learned

We realised we needed to be very specific when using AI, as when we were requested a change it altered in a slightly different way than we had hoped. Testing is key to make sure we don't miss anything key like the the UK assumption.

What's next for Nod and Hope

We hope to have more countries and languages. We would like to have more situations that people can use our app for and practise with. We would also hope to eventually be able to make it usuable without wifi or relying on 4G in foreign countries.