Notice Bridge

Inspiration Millions of people—especially immigrant families, the elderly, and first-generation households—receive official notices they simply cannot understand. Whether it's an eviction notice, a utility disconnection warning, or a medical bill, missing a deadline can cost someone their housing, money, or benefits. Scammers also prey on these communities with fake "official" letters. We built NoticeBridge to democratize access to legal and bureaucratic understanding.

What it does NoticeBridge allows users to upload a photo, paste text, or upload a PDF of an official notice. Within seconds, it returns a single, decision-ready screen containing:

A 6th-grade reading level summary of what the notice is. The exact, mathematically calculated deadline. A tickable, actionable checklist of what to do next. A deterministic Scam-Risk check based on known threat vectors. A built-in Letter Generator that automatically drafts a professional response (like an extension request or dispute) using the extracted data, ready to print. How we built it We built NoticeBridge using Next.js 14 (App Router) and TypeScript for a robust, lightning-fast frontend. We styled it using Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui, ensuring high contrast and extreme readability.

To process documents securely and instantly, we developed a 100% Offline Deterministic Extraction Engine. Instead of relying on expensive, rate-limited cloud LLMs, our engine uses advanced Regular Expressions and keyword heuristics to instantly parse dates, financial amounts, and notice types. We built a zero-persistence architecture—no databases, no cloud storage—meaning users' highly sensitive legal documents are never saved.

Challenges we ran into API Limits & Costs: Initially, we relied on cloud AI APIs to parse documents. However, we hit severe authentication and rate limits during deployment. We completely pivoted midway through the hackathon, ripping out the LLM entirely and writing our own offline deterministic parsing engine from scratch to guarantee 100% uptime. Privacy Guarantees: We needed to ensure users felt safe uploading sensitive documents like tax returns or court summons. We achieved this by keeping the entire application stateless and executing PDF parsing locally in the browser via Web Workers. Accomplishments that we're proud of Successfully pivoting from a cloud AI app to a 100% offline, deterministic engine under extreme hackathon time constraints. Building a truly accessible application with built-in accessibility toolbars (dyslexia-friendly spacing, dynamic font scaling, contrast toggles). Designing a seamless, calm UI that reduces panic rather than adding to it. What we learned We learned that you don't always need an LLM to solve complex semantic problems. By carefully mapping out the domain (evictions, utilities, medical bills), we were able to build a highly accurate, regex-based heuristic engine that is infinitely faster, cheaper, and more private than calling an external API.

What's next for Notice Bridge We want to expand our offline deterministic engine to support more edge cases across all 50 states, add multi-language translation support, and integrate direct APIs with local legal aid organizations to automatically route complex cases to pro-bono lawyers.