PassePartout

Inspiration

What if your phone could act as a multilingual local guide — understanding your interests, building the perfect route, and narrating your journey in real-time? That’s exactly what PassePartout aims to achieve. Our inspiration came from the frustration of navigating new cities without context or guidance, and the excitement of combining AI with travel.

What it does

PassePartout is an AI-powered travel companion that transforms city exploration into a personalized, narrated experience.

• Uses Gemini and NLP to interpret natural language prompts. You just tell PassePartout where you want to travel — “Give me a travel plan for Toronto Canada” — and it understands.
• Intelligently selects points of interest and solves the Traveling Salesman Problem to create the most time-efficient route.
• Generates real-time and gps-triggered narration scripts for each stop — from historical facts to quirky trivia — making it feel like you have a private tour guide.
• Remembers past interactions for seamless follow-ups.
• Front end features:
  • Live map with your optimized walking route
  • Dynamic itinerary
  • Real-time travel stats (distance, calories, time)

How we built it

• Frontend: React with Leaflet for interactive mapping
  
• Backend: FastAPI to handle requests and routing logic
  
• NLP & AI: Gemini API for parsing input and generating narration
  
• Optimization: Custom TSP solver for route efficiency
  

Challenges we ran into

• Parsing ambiguous or incomplete natural language inputs
  
• Handling empty or irrelevant API results and ensuring graceful fallbacks
  
• Connecting serverless deployment environments with long-running computations
  

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Building a full-stack AI travel assistant within a hackathon timeframe
  
• Smooth integration between route optimization and AI narration
  
• Developing a clean, intuitive UI
  

What we learned

• How to combine NLP and route optimization in a practical, user-friendly app
  
• How to adapt FastAPI for deployment on platforms like Render and Vercel
  
• The importance of fallback strategies when external APIs return no useful data
  

What's next for PassePartout

• Add support for more languages in narration
  
• Integrate real-time transit or bike routes
  
• Enable offline functionality for travelers without data plans
  

Built With

• fastapi
• gemini
• geojson
• leaflet.js
• natural-language-processing
• nominatim
• openstreetmap
• openweathermap
• optimization
• or-tools
• osrm
• overpass-openstreetmap
• prompt-engineering
• python
• react