Therabot

This is a chatbot to cope with different types of mental illnesses and helps increase accessibility to therapy for all people regardless of age, gender, or race.

Comment

Inspiration As highschoolers we experience mental and emotional stress from the loads of work and pressure to become successful and make our parents proud. Although many can manage these anxieties not everyone in the world can... not even adults in the workforce. Also experiencing depression first hand, we decided to create something that could help people get through rough times. Create something that we would have wanted through our hard times.

What it does This is a AI powered therapeutic chat bot, which allows you to give any type of prompt regarding problems that you are dealing with. In return, "TheraBot" will respond with a detailed, empathetic, and uplifting message to help you.

How we built it Using OpenAI's API combined with a backend to process the user's prompts and message history, we were able to create an AI chatting environment. The front end was created through the use of React, Tailwind CSS, and Framer Motion. The user enters their prompt. Then the prompt is collected by the backend via HTTP requests. After this step, the prompt is parsed by the OpenAI API. Lastly, the prompt and response get added to a message history saved in a MongoDB Atlas cloud database. To ensure success throughout this project, we made deadlines and evenly divided work with an extra three days for finishing changes.

Challenges we ran into While making the frontend a problem we had was making the overall feel simple and visually appealing. Another problem was making sure that the user experience was smooth and easy to navigate. Some problems in the backend was the parsing and formatting of the message history; however, we solved this through the use of markdown for formatting and array manipulation for the parsing of the message history.

Accomplishments that we're proud of We are proud of learning to use OpenAI's API in order to solve a problem that is not only relatable to us, but also millions. We are also proud of being able to stay organized and calm as a team through this journey of developing TheraBot. Not only did we create something we are passionate about, but we also learned and enjoyed the process.

What we learned We learned writing a Node.js backend with Express along with implementing a MongoDB database. Through the development of the frontend, we learned the basics of React, the use of inline Tailwind CSS styles, and basic Framer Motion animations. Another skill we acquired was understanding and reading through documentation. Lastly, we learned greatly about the basics of artifical intelligence, which is a cutting edge technology today.

What's next for Therabot With some investment, we can purchase a better tier of OpenAI's API in order to make more complex responses from "TheraBot". We also would like to add a functionality to save chats and start new ones, instead of a one time use and delete. We would like to expand "TheraBot's" demographic and accessibility by increasing efficiency and making it free.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates