Inspiration
We all share a struggle of easily seeing our time at a glance. There's a lot of events to keep track of! Schedulers such as Google Calendar can be a hassle to use due to having to manually create events for the week, and using spreadsheets are tedious to use due to having to format and type in the events manually. We wanted something where we could quickly create a visualization of the time we had.
What it does
What SimplyWeekly does is create an easier way to schedule your week. You can do this by typing events in the text box such as "Grab food tmmr at 8 am" and "Do my homework in the evening". By typing these events into the box, the events get scheduled inside the calendar displayed in the application for users to easily see their week's schedule.
How we built it
We built this application by using Reactjs for the UI and used Python, Flask, and MongoDB for the backend. We wrote our own natural language parser that accepts simple commands and puts them on the calendar.
Challenges we ran into
We had some trouble integrating the frontend and backend to process the text in the textbox, update the events in the database, and the update what is displayed on the calendar into our Reactjs project. Additionally the NLP has been a huge challenge for our project in parsing a statement into an event title, a duration, and a starting timestamp, then updating the database, and then pushing back to the frontend.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We all came in with pretty disparate skillsets, it was amazing that we managed to use all of our strengths in this project.
What we learned
We learned that human language is very convoluted as we were trying to use NLP to predict what the user wants to set up for the calendar. Users can type in various ways and mean similar meanings, for example, "Set an alarm tmmr morning" and "09:00 alarm" or vise versa. For our project, we had to take account these various meanings of phrases to make our calendar project understand what the user wants on their schedule.
What's next for SimplyWeekly
We would like to add more functionality to make the system even faster and more intuitive to use. We could support more diverse inputs as well. We also wanted to make this more intuitive to use on mobile. Also we could integrate our calendar with existing services, so that people can work on blocking their time outside of meetings.
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