Inspiration
While shopping online or in stores, I often found myself juggling multiple tabs, price comparisons, and product details — it felt overwhelming and inefficient. I wanted a friendly assistant that could help find products, answer questions, and guide my shopping experience through simple voice commands. That’s why I created Shopi, a voice-controlled shopping assistant: to make shopping as easy as having a conversation with a helpful friend.
What it does
Shopi is a web-based voice assistant that listens to your shopping requests — like “Find the best running shoes under $100” — and instantly searches online marketplaces to fetch matching products. It then reads out product options, helps compare items, and even remembers your shopping list. Shopi’s goal is to reduce friction and make shopping smarter, hands-free, and more interactive.
How we built it
Frontend: Built with React.js, providing an intuitive interface for mic controls and displaying search results.
Voice Processing: Used the vapi API for speech-to-text and text-to-speech to handle real-time conversation.
Challenges we ran into
Accurate Speech Recognition: Handling diverse accents and shopping-specific phrases with browser-based STT had limitations. API Limitations: Many product APIs have rate limits or require complex approval processes, which constrained real-time searches. Voice Feedback Timing: Ensuring natural, smooth conversation flow — avoiding overlaps between user input and Shopi’s voice responses — was tricky to get right. Context Awareness: Maintaining context across multiple queries like “Show me red ones” (after “Find running shoes”) required extra work.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Achieved a fully hands-free, interactive shopping experience in a web app. Built a conversation loop that feels natural for searching and comparing products. Designed an accessible UI that lets users with limited mobility shop independently.
What we learned
Real-time voice interfaces can dramatically improve user engagement — but require careful UX design to avoid user frustration. Shopping APIs often lack standardized responses, making normalization and parsing a significant challenge. Providing visual and audio feedback simultaneously improves user trust and makes the experience more intuitive.
What's next for shopi
Integrate payment and checkout flows, so users can complete purchases entirely by voice. Add personalized recommendations using browsing history and preferences. Support multi-lingual voice commands to make Shopi accessible worldwide. Build a mobile-first progressive web app for on-the-go shopping assistance.
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