Inspiration
What inspired me was my own experiences as a young adult struggling to navigate the complex world of finance. I noticed a lack of resources available to help teenagers and young adults learn about budgeting, investing, and financial planning. The world of finance can be intimidating, with complex jargon and confusing terms, and unfortunately, financial literacy is not typically taught in schools.
I wanted to create a solution to this problem by making financial literacy accessible and easy to understand for the next generation. I believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to build wealth and achieve financial security, regardless of their background or financial knowledge. With Penny, the financial literacy bot, I hope to empower teenagers and young adults to take control of their finances and create a better future for themselves.
What it does
The financial literacy bot was created to help teenagers and young adults learn how to manage their finances, build wealth, and achieve their financial goals. With the rise of the gig economy, part-time jobs, and online entrepreneurship, it's more important than ever for this demographic to have a solid understanding of financial literacy.
The bot is easy to use and offers a wide range of features, including:
Budgeting: With the bot, users can create a budget that suits their lifestyle, whether they're saving for college, a car, or a trip around the world. It's easy to set goals, track expenses, and adjust their budget as their circumstances change.
Investing: The bot offers a basic introduction to investing, covering the different types of investments available, the risks and rewards associated with each, and how to get started. It helps demystify the stock market and make it accessible to everyone.
Financial Planning: The bot offers advice on how to plan for major life events, such as buying a house or starting a family. It provides tips on how to save money, build credit, and avoid debt.
Personalized Recommendations: The bot uses artificial intelligence to personalize recommendations based on each user's individual financial situation. It suggests ways to save money, increase income, and achieve financial goals.
The bot is designed for teenagers and young adults who are just starting out in the world of finance. Whether they're saving up for a car, planning for college, or starting a small business, the bot can help them achieve their goals. Financial literacy is the key to building wealth and financial security, and this bot is committed to helping the next generation of entrepreneurs and investors succeed.
How we built it
The tech stack I used is pretty lean and straightforward. It comprised python, flask framework, and machine learning libraries available as open source. The chatbot was built using telegram's open-source chatbot interface.
Challenges we ran into
- Data creation- The biggest challenge was training the NLP model to tailor the experience to be a little more humorous and likable by Gen-Z. Due to a lack of data it had self-made. The data was made with 100 individual responses to certain types of questions.
- UI Interface - Building a UI interface was challenging due to the number of moving parts in the front end. After experimenting with various tools like Bravo, Figma, Wix, and Valeo I was unable to get a UI up and running. This is where telegram helped.
- Model training- Due to the enormous number of paraments in the GPT model it became a challenge to perform hyperparameter tuning. ## Accomplishments that we're proud of I am proud that I have been able to build a product that is going to help so many up-and-coming teenagers learn about financial well-being. This being accomplished in a day has given me so many more ideas to work on with penny to grow and scale it for a much larger audience. ## What we learned During the course of building Penny, I picked up on a lot of concepts:
- Working with HTTP and SSL request
- Harnessing Flask as an intermediary between python and other web services.
- Learned how to use google console and Tenor API
- Learned to implement GPT for NLP tasks ## What's next for Penny - The finance bot There are a lot of challenges ahead for Penny. For penny to be a real friend-like figure to which people can for advice is a long-standing challenge. I would like to see penny become scalable enough to cater to millions of young adults who desperately need help with personal finances.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.