Taste Compass

Discover who you are through what you love.

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Inspiration

We’ve all felt it—there’s so much content, so many options, and yet, it’s harder than ever to figure out what really speaks to you. We wanted to change that. Taste Compass was born out of a simple idea: what if your favorite music, movies, foods, books, and travel spots could actually help you understand yourself better? Thanks to AI and real-world cultural data from Qloo, we built a tool that turns your personal tastes into insights—so you can discover not just what you like, but who you are.

What it does

Taste Compass is a cultural intelligence and self-discovery platform. It helps users:

Build a personal Taste Profile across six life domains

Get a personalized Identity Map with AI-analyzed personality themes

Explore cities with Taste-Aligned Recommendations

Track how preferences evolve over time

Use an AI assistant to receive guidance and explore ideas

Soon, leverage a business-focused Affinity Analyzer for market insights

The result is a living, growing cultural fingerprint — a personalized compass to navigate experiences, places, and ideas that resonate with who you truly are.

How we built it

Frontend: React + TypeScript for a robust, type-safe UI

Styling: Tailwind CSS for a responsive, clean design

Backend: Supabase for authentication, real-time data, and PostgreSQL storage

AI: OpenAI GPT models for identity analysis and chat assistant

Cultural Intelligence: Qloo API for real-world recommendations, affinity scores, and taste correlations

Visualization: Recharts for temporal trend tracking

Serverless AI Logic: Edge Functions for lightweight, scalable processing

Cross-platform: Fully mobile responsive

Challenges we ran into

Parsing and aligning Qloo’s rich but complex API models into accessible user outputs

Ensuring the platform remained engaging and exploratory while also being analytically meaningful

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Created a multi-domain profiling engine that feels personal and expressive

Built a fully integrated identity + taste + discovery flow

Seamlessly combined AI (OpenAI) and cultural intelligence (Qloo) for deep user insight

Designed a flexible architecture to support individual self-reflection and future market discovery use cases

Made cultural and psychological introspection approachable through UI/UX and smart recommendations

What we learned

One of the most eye-opening parts of this project was discovering what Qloo is capable of. I realized that cultural insights data can do so much more than just recommend content—it can identify the right audience for a business idea, reveal what’s trending in different places, and even guide product and marketing decisions. Combining that with AI showed me how powerful personal taste can be when it's connected to real-world data.

What's next for Taste Compass

Finalize and launch the Affinity Analyzer to support creative entrepreneurs and solo founders

Add real-time taste trends (Qloo’s Trending API) into the evolution tracker

Introduce Taste Matching — find people or communities with shared cultural DNA

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