Finglish

Inspiration

As incoming college students, we know how stressful the process of applying to loans and getting financial help can be when you haven’t been exposed to the jargon yet. Therefore, we wanted to create an app that helps individuals with limited finance knowledge understand the contracts they are signing and gain financial advice.

What it does

Finglish allows the user to upload a PDF file of any financial agreement. Once receiving the file, the program breaks down the contents of the file into chunks and uses Chat-GPT 3 to summarize each chunk for the user in an easy-to-understand manner.

How we built it

We built this program using React for the front-end and Python for the back-end. We leveraged VisualStudio to create a Python API and connect our front and back end (where we used Flask). We also utilized the Chat-GPT 3 API.

Challenges we ran into

As a team with limited React knowledge, we struggled to create the front-end part of the application in a manner that was convenient for the user, yet functional. Specifically, when trying to send an inputted file to another HTML page, we weren’t able to get access to the file. We also struggled with creating the Python API as React wasn’t able to get responses from the API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of the idea and motivation behind Finglish. It’s a unique idea that leverages AI to improve the community in an innovative way. We’re also proud of the way we worked together as team, splitting up the work to make the process more efficient and motivating each other throughout this journey.

What we learned

We learned how an API works, from creating our own API to utilizing OpenAI's API. Through the process of using React, we learned how the React framework works and how to debug in React. Lastly, we learned how to combine front-end and back-end through the use of APIs.

What's next for Finglish

In the future we would like to incorporate an aspect of audio that reads the text out loud to you to help individuals that might not be able to read the information, due to disabilities or even inability to read English. Additionally, we would like to expand Finglish to give the user the option to upload an image that we could parse through. Lastly, we would like to incorporate an option that gives users advice regarding if they should accept the loan agreement based off of their financial standing.