Self-reflection

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  Personas

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  Domains of self reflection

Inspiration

I have been exploring mental health topics for a couple of years now and whatever approach we want to choose, they all start with one thing: self reflection. Recently I was talking to my partner (a clinical therapist) about conversation patterns and this sparked the idea to create a tool that can assist users in reflecting on various topics. For me personally the topics of data privacy was very important and I didn't feel comfortable sharing my most inner thoughts over the internet. This is why I was excited to create something that works fully locally. Fun fact: Before I've learned about this challenge or the chrome built-in AI features I was exploring ways to expose local models running in Ollama or localAI through an extension to give web apps access to local AI features.

What it does

It is an AI-assisted self reflection tool. It provides the user with open questions to help them navigate more clearly in their inner world. When reflecting on any topic, the user can choose from a list of personas, who will assist them in their reflection journey. Also the app has reflection domains – collections of open questions on topics like values, relationships and more. The app supports 3 languages natively: English, Spanish and Japanese. It has PWA functionality so the user can write self reflections and get AI assistance even when offline. I think from the state I submit the app it can be developed beyond the simple "AI conversationalist". When the data set of self reflection grows, AI could be used to recognise cognitive patterns across reflections and help the user even further.

How we built it

I tried focusing strongly on user experience, a minimal UI and basic application flow. Like always (pareto principle) 80% of the work went into polishing and quality of life features like saving unsubmitted text input or getting markdown to work properly.

Challenges we ran into

Fine-tuning the prompts for personas and utility functions was definitely a challenge. Also handling non-deterministic behaviour from the AI was tricky. I ended up writing a benchmarking tool to test different prompt approaches.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

While developing I liked it already so much, that I've moved all my self reflections from notion to the self-reflection app. I hope others will value it as much as I do and help me improve it further.

What we learned

Most of my learnings during this challenge are with AI.

What's next for Self-reflection

I plan to continue working on the self reflection app, providing it for free to the public. Not sure how to promote such an app yet.

Built With

• ai
• chakra
• i18next
• indexeddb
• javascript
• node.js
• react
• typescript
• vite