SamVsGoose.ai

Sam.ai: Scrapes from official UMass sources.
Goose.ai: Scrapes from top Reddit comments.

Inspiration

The first few months are a turbulent time for most new students, with thousands of new students scrambling to learn more about what to do and where to go. SamVsGoose.ai aims to provide a pair of guides that may help new arrivals better acclimate to the UMass community-- one by referencing official university sources and the other providing the voice of other students.

What it does

Allows users to have a text conversation with one of two chatbots at a time, toggled between by clicking on the title. Sam.ai is trained off official UMass websites, while Goose.ai is trained off reddit posts by UMass students. A FAQ section is provided on the left with a list of high-frequency topics that, when clicked, enter a sample question in the user input textbox. Details on Sam and Goose are provided in an info section to the right. Both of these can be shown or hidden depending on the user's needs.

How we built it

We used custom python scripts to scrape various separate groups of websites for Sam and Goose. The information was then stored in json files and sent to a mongoDB database. The front end was built with Svelte and the back end was built with Flask, with an OpenAI api as a middleman that dynamically transformed user input into function calls.

Challenges we ran into

When working with tons of data, we started getting rate limited by GitHub, OpenAI, and even by Reddit. We also faced integration problems with Nodejs and Flask, as well as formatting issues in the database.