Talkative

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Inspiration

Around 5%-10% of Americans have communication disorders. Many times, this can cause difficulty in understanding how one’s messages come off to people. As such, things that you say can be misunderstood leading to tensions in both professional and personal relationships. To help people that struggle with such communication barriers, we present Talkative.

What it does

Talkative provides two systems to help users practice communication exercises. Sentiment Analysis reveals to users what emotions are associated with messages they enter into it, while the second system utilizes a chatbot to simulate a conversation that users might have outside of the website. This helps users understand how they are being received and helps them actively improve upon it in a comfortable and controlled environment.

How we built it

We built this tool as a web application. For the backend, we used Express and NodeJS. For the frontend, we utilized the EJS templating engine. We also employed npm packages like socket.io for realtime messaging on the browser. The primary tool powering the various communication exercises on our platform was Cohere. We used a Cohere model trained on roughly 40000 tweets to classify messages based on the emotion they conveyed and also used a generative Cohere model to create the chatbot used in our application.

Challenges we ran into

We had problems understanding some of the frameworks and tools, but after some serious late night coding and Lofi music, were able to successfully integrate them into our product!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of how much we learned from this hackathon, and hope our product helps those suffering from communication disorders around the world!

What we learned

We learned about the impact of communication disorders, potential solutions, a variety of technologies in fields like web development and natural language processing, as well as how to make a product from start to finish!