NOVA - Your Life. One Intelligent Assistant.

Inspiration

College students don't need another productivity app. They need something that connects the ones they already use.

Between Canvas assignments, overflowing email inboxes, internship applications, calendar conflicts, and everyday responsibilities, students spend too much time managing their lives instead of actually living them.

We asked ourselves: What if students could manage everything through a single conversation?

That's how NOVA was born.

What It Does

NOVA is a voice-first, agentic AI assistant designed to simplify student life.

Instead of switching between multiple platforms, students can simply speak to NOVA and receive intelligent, personalized assistance.

NOVA brings together several areas of student life:

Academic support: Connect with Canvas, organize assignments, track deadlines, and prepare for exams.
Email intelligence: Summarize important emails, identify urgent messages, and help draft responses.
Smart scheduling: Find available time, manage commitments, and help create calendar events.
Current events: Deliver personalized news, interest-based notifications, and spoken daily briefings.
Career assistance: Help discover internships, organize opportunities, and prepare for interviews.

What makes NOVA different is its goal of connecting these capabilities through one intelligent assistant rather than treating them as separate tools.

For example, a student could ask:

"NOVA, what's due this week, which emails need my attention, and when can I study?"*

NOVA is designed to coordinate the relevant information, suggest an actionable plan, and help the student follow through.

How We Built It

We built NOVA around a modular, agentic architecture, allowing different services to work through one shared assistant.

Our development uses Python, FastAPI, and Vapi to establish the backend, voice interface, and tool-calling foundation. We also developed a current-events prototype that gathers personalized news from sources such as Google News RSS, ESPN, and Hacker News.

Our broader architecture is designed to support integrations with Canvas, Gmail, Google Calendar, Gemini, and shared AI memory and retrieval systems.

We organized development into independent components so team members could build specialized capabilities while working toward one connected experience.

Accessibility Matters

A major motivation behind NOVA is making AI more accessible.

We designed NOVA around a voice-first, not voice-only philosophy. Our goal is for students to interact naturally through speech while also having access to written responses, clear navigation, adjustable text, screen-reader support, and simplified explanations.

Technology should adapt to the student, not require the student to adapt to the technology.

Challenges We Faced

Our biggest challenge was designing one coherent assistant from multiple independently developed systems within a 24-hour hackathon.

Coordinating voice interactions, backend services, external APIs, and shared context required us to think carefully about modularity and integration.

We also had to balance ambitious features with practical development time, making strategic decisions about which workflows to prototype first.

What We Learned

Building NOVA taught us that an AI assistant is only as useful as the actions it can reliably support.

We explored agent orchestration, voice-enabled interfaces, API integration, modular backend development, and collaborative engineering under tight deadlines.

Most importantly, we learned the value of designing around real student problems rather than simply adding AI to existing workflows.

What's Next

Our vision extends beyond the hackathon.

We want to expand NOVA's live integrations, strengthen its personalized memory, improve accessibility, and create more seamless connections between academics, communication, scheduling, career development, and wellness.

NOVA isn't just about helping students get more done. It's about giving them more time and mental space for what matters.

Less switching tabs. More living.