Inspiration
Thinking back to going to the mall every weekend to hang out with friends, I realized that ecommerce can sometimes be a tiresome and lonely time. Furthermore shopping online tends to give you a disconnected feeling where you end up mindlessly shopping and completely overshooting your budget.
Taking these in mind, we wanted to create a more personal and social ecommerce experience. Hence ShopPal has born: an AI cartoon character that interacted with the user, asking them casual questions, telling jokes, and making unique comments based on the search history and type of websites the user was looking for in order to replicate real life conversations.
What it does
ShopPal is a chrome browser extension, that is easily accessible in the chrome web extension tabs. Our code featured an animated character that one of our team members designed and created from scratch who would appear and disappear across the extension popup, spouting messages to it's users.
How we built it
None of our three members had very much coding experience, so we stuck together and created the framework of the site using html and CSS, however after that was finished, we all branched out and tried to create our own unique part of the browser extension, searching for some new knowledge that we could learn and implement in order to create a more accessible and enjoyable website.
Challenges we ran into
The undeniable, daunting fact that we are incredibly inexperienced had nothing on our unwavering determination to climb this mountain of a project. Being the first hackathon for all of our team members, many things were surprising. We faced many problems, including time management, underdeveloped technical skills, and especially a lack of sleep.
What we learned and Accomplishments that we're proud of
Admittedly, we knew next to nothing before participating in this hackathon. While there is only so much one can learn in 36 hours, we definitely made the most of our time. Not only did we gain tons of valuable experience with a few different languages, we learned valuable skills and concepts which we will be sure to apply in the future. While there were some bumps in the road, they were more learning experience than challenge. One thing we struggled with was time management, but now we know where we went wrong, and how we can do better in our next event.
What's next for ShopPal
After creating a simple AI and persona, we want to delve deeper into this character that we had built and truly push it to it's limits. We would aspire to create a robot that gets to know people based on their online habits and how they interact with the AI. ShopPal would store this information and compare it with other data gathered in order to learn more about online habits and find new creative ways to be useful and innovative.
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