RetrieverGuide for UMBC

Created by Lucian Pazour, Abdu Mahgoub, Yinka Kolewole

Inspiration

Information is vital to success and as such should be easily accessible, especially to college students. Do you remember your freshman years? When young brilliant minds were thrown into a brave new world! Surely all of us can relate to this scenario: It’s your first couple of weeks or months at a new university and you are teeming with questions. Well we remember our first couple of weeks at UMBC, none of us knew where to go or where things were, we knew no one nor where to meet them and we were not confident in what classes to select. Well we wanted to make that process easier and hope that our chat bot can help accomplish that.

What it does

Our web accessible chat bot allows a user to type or speak a question regarding UMBC and the bot will display a comprehensive text answer and speak a summarized answer to the user.

How we built it

We built it using javascript, css and html. We also implemented the google Gemini API to answer the users questions about UMBC.

Challenges we ran into

Ran into challenges learning front-end development since this was a first for most of us.
We also had difficulties working with the API and figuring out how to get it to hear us speak and speak back to us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

UI design.
Proper prompt engineering on the Gemini API to tailor responses.

What we learned

Front-end development
Using API's
Developed proper planning and execution for a project within a short time frame (This is our first time at a hackathon)
AI prompting

What's next for RetrieverGuide for UMBC

Fact-checking the information
Linking the UMBC's SGApps API for events to Gemini's responses
Adding additional languages to the chat bots responses (it can understand other selected languages, just cannot write or speak responses in those langauges yet)