Scallywag Scanner

Inspiration

In this era of vast exploration across the great oceans of the internet, bilge rats and thieves lurk beneath the currents, looking to deceive and plunder the next unsuspecting landlubber. Thankfully, trinkets and tools have become a’plenty to combat these rapscallion’s treachery. Scallywag Scanner aims to leverage the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence to bring safety and security to all buccaneers, one cyberscroll at a time.

What it does

Our final project offers a quick solution to verify the safety of an email. With a few simple clicks, users can upload screenshots of their emails, and immediately receive a safety reading of the email. A percentage on how likely it is to be a scam is given, alongside a quick explanation of what makes an email suspicious or not.

How we built it

We developed our website using the provided startercode from the Next.js workshop as the main base. Everything is written in JavaScript, and the website is styled using CSS. After a file is received from the client, it is parsed and encoded to become an image usable by Google Gemini. The image, alongside a pre-engineered text prompt, is sent to be analyzed using the Gemini API, after which the response can be displayed on the website for the user to read.

Challenges we ran into

The primary challenge we faced as a team was general unfamiliarity with web development across the board. Although some of us had some amount of knowledge about front-end work, it was a learning curve for the rest. Furthermore, none of us were familiar with back-end development, and overcoming that lack of experience became a significant challenge for us to overcome.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite a relatively low starting level of knowledge and tight time constraints, our team was able to come up with workarounds and strategies to make full use of what we already knew or could learn in a short amount of time. Ultimately, we were able to greatly mitigate the impacts of not having back-end experience, and complete our project in the end.

What we learned

This project was a good experience for all of us to practice front-end development and building a fully functional website from start to finish. Additionally, we were able to incorporate generative AI in our solution, and in the process improved our ability to work efficiently with APIs.

What's next for Scallywag Scanner

A successful pirate is one who knows how to get things done quickly and cleanly! In the future, instead of having users go out of their way to post pictures to a website, something like a Chrome extension or similar app would be great for allowing users to detect scam emails directly from their inbox, without the hassle of taking a screenshot and opening a separate window to access our program.

Built With

• css
• gemini-api
• javascript
• next.js