Solace

Inspiration

Mental health is often overlooked until it becomes a crisis. We wanted to create something that helps people feel seen, supported, and safe—before they reach that point. Solace was born from the idea that everyone deserves a quiet space to reflect, heal, and grow—no matter where they are or what they’re going through.

What it does

Solace is a digital companion for mental wellness. It offers:

Daily emotional check-ins using conversational AI
Guided journaling with mood tracking
Mindfulness exercises tailored to your emotional state
Crisis resources and support pathways
Private, secure reflections stored locally or encrypted in the cloud

How we built it

We used:

Python for backend logic and data processing
Streamlit for a fast, interactive frontend experience
FastAPI to serve endpoints and manage async interactions
Ollama to run open-source LLMs locally
GPT-OSS for empathetic journaling and prompt generation

This stack allowed us to build a privacy-first, responsive app that runs efficiently even on modest hardware.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing empathy and privacy: Ensuring the app felt emotionally intelligent without storing sensitive data insecurely.
Tone tuning: Making the AI responses feel supportive without sounding robotic or overly clinical.
Accessibility: Designing for users with anxiety, depression, or neurodivergence required thoughtful UX decisions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a fully functional MVP in under 2 weeks
Received positive feedback from early testers, especially around the journaling experience

What we learned

People crave non-judgmental spaces to express themselves.
Mental health tools must be gentle, flexible, and deeply respectful of user boundaries.
Building trust is more important than flashy features.

What's next for Solace

Integrating with wearables to track physiological signals like heart rate and sleep
Launching community features for peer support (opt-in and anonymized)
Partnering with mental health professionals to offer curated content and live support
Expanding to multiple languages and cultural contexts