Poro AI

Poro AI is a voice-powered AI study agent that helps students understand topics, find videos and books, summarize PDFs, build resumes, review resumes, and plan their careers from one dashboard.

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Inspiration

As a student, I noticed that learning and academic productivity often require too many separate tools. A student may use one tool for understanding a topic, another for summarizing PDFs, another for resume building, another for coding help, and another for finding learning resources. This creates friction and wastes time.

That inspired me to build Poro Mentor, an AI-powered study workspace where students can learn, ask questions, summarize files, build resumes, plan careers, get coding help, and even generate visual assets from one place.

The main idea was simple:

Students should not need many tools to study smarter. They should have one AI mentor that understands their academic needs.

What it does

Poro Mentor is an AI-powered student assistant and productivity workspace. It includes multiple modes designed for different student workflows:

  • Default Chat for normal AI conversation
  • Study Helper for topic explanation, notes, quizzes, and flashcards
  • PDF / Notes Summarizer for understanding uploaded documents
  • Image Understanding for analyzing uploaded images
  • Book Finder and resource discovery
  • Career Guide for roadmaps and skill planning
  • Coding Helper for programming support
  • Productivity Planner for study routines and task breakdown
  • Campus Assistant for student-related help
  • Resume Builder with live preview, PDF export, and AI review
  • AI Image Generation for posters, thumbnails, banners, and study visuals

It also includes chat history, prompt editing, retry options, copy buttons, model selection, file upload, and a clean student-friendly interface.

How I built it

The project was built as a full-stack web application.

The frontend was created using:

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • Font Awesome
  • Google Fonts
  • AOS animations

The backend was built using:

  • Node.js
  • Express.js
  • OpenAI JavaScript SDK
  • Multer for file uploads
  • PDF parsing workflow
  • Local file storage for generated images

OpenAI is used for the main AI workflows, including chat responses, study support, PDF/image understanding, resume review, coding help, career guidance, model listing, and image generation.

The project uses several backend endpoints:

Method Endpoint Purpose
GET /api/health Server health check
GET /api/models Loads available GPT models
POST /api/agent Main AI mentor chat endpoint
POST /api/agent-files Handles multiple PDF/image uploads
POST /api/pdf Single PDF summarization
POST /api/image Single image analysis
POST /api/generate-image AI image generation

The resume builder was built with a step-by-step form, live preview, template selection, profile photo upload, AI review, and PDF export support.

Challenges I faced

One of the biggest challenges was making the project feel like a complete AI workspace instead of a basic chatbot. I wanted the mentor page to support different student modes while still keeping the interface clean and easy to use.

Some major challenges were:

  • Designing a polished ChatGPT-like mentor interface
  • Adding multiple agent modes
  • Supporting PDF and image uploads together
  • Making the AI understand user instructions with uploaded files
  • Adding AI image generation inside the chat workflow
  • Creating a resume builder with live preview and export
  • Managing chat history locally
  • Making the UI responsive and hackathon-demo ready
  • Preparing the repository safely without exposing API keys

Another challenge was balancing features with usability. Since the project includes many workflows, I had to organize everything clearly so a student can understand and use it quickly.

What I learned

While building Poro Mentor, I learned how to connect a frontend application with a Node.js/Express backend and use OpenAI APIs for different AI workflows.

I learned more about:

  • Building AI agent modes
  • Working with OpenAI chat and image generation
  • Handling file uploads with Multer
  • Extracting text from PDFs
  • Designing a better user experience for students
  • Creating a resume builder with live preview
  • Making a project GitHub-ready and API-key safe
  • Structuring a hackathon project for demo and judging

Most importantly, I learned that an AI product becomes more useful when it solves a real workflow, not just when it answers questions.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

I am proud that Poro Mentor became more than a simple chatbot. It is a complete student-focused platform with study help, PDF/image understanding, resume building, AI review, career guidance, coding support, productivity planning, resource discovery, and image generation.

I am also proud of the polished UI, the clean agent mode system, and the fact that the project is ready for GitHub and hackathon submission.

What is next for Poro Mentor

In the future, I want to improve Poro Mentor with:

  • User login and cloud-based chat history
  • More resume templates
  • University-specific campus support
  • Real YouTube API integration with thumbnails
  • Voice conversation mode
  • Cloud resume storage
  • Collaborative study rooms
  • Mobile app version
  • More advanced image editing features

The long-term vision is to make Poro Mentor a complete AI learning companion for students.

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