Speakeasy

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Inspiration

Speakeasy was inspired by a desire to better connect and empathize with our friends in both in person and online interactions. Often, we share a large portion of our lives online, but don't have time to stay updated with our friends. We were looking for a way to be able to talk to our friends without missing any critical updates to their situation.

What it does

To stay in touch with our friends and family, our users will run our application on their desktop device, and later through wearable electronics. With the consent of both parties, we source public data from their social networks such as X.com (formerly Twitter) and collect essential information they have shared with the internet. This includes light hearted posts like puppy pictures, milestones like graduation, but also serious events like a death in the family. Our goal is to support our users through conversation guidance and empathetic warnings. In this way our social network can help our users connect in a closer and meaningful way when spending time with each other, online and in person.

How we built it

We built our demonstration application with a front end using Cursor for a palatable interface with functioning interactions and room for scaling with HTML and CSS. In our back end, we divided the work, from AI integration, web scraping, and natural language processing. This ranges from understanding the images and messages in different tweets to sending sending the audible AI message through a simulated voice. We used PyTorch, LMNT, playwright, and JavaScript. Additionally, we also planned for the future with integrating wearable electronics, where we have a homemade heartbeat sensor to connect to our AI and share when a conversation may cause significant stress to users.

Challenges we ran into

The project held key concerns from the start, especially in privacy and scalability. Thus we were careful to structure our product where all parties would consent to the service, to work in tandem to better understand and communicate with each other. We knew that if our users could feel safe with their privacy protected, then they would be comfortable using our service to have a two way smart communication with their friends and family.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to showcase a strong product that will support an unvaluable human trait, communication. With an intuitive UI, safe web scraping, understandable text-to-speech, and a strong user experience, our platform can help guide our users into a safer, closer, and open social interactions.

What we learned

Aside from the technical skills in web scraping, natural language processing, and image recognition, we learned to work as a team. This project was essential to work together, because we wanted to build something meant for interpersonal conversations. Thus we learned the importance of collective input, listening to each other, and working towards building a great product. We are happy to have worked together to build this product.

What's next for Speakeasy

Speakeasy may find a future in wearable and consumer electronics, where we can transcribe live conversations, input the text into our engine, and return an AI speech of audible warnings or hints during a conversation through an earpiece or even AR glasses integration.