explr.ai

landing page - search a location right away or explore some of our favorite locations
input a location, number of days, and price-point for your trip
swipe through recommended attractions
"lapse-like" slideshow of all the location on your trip
displays an animated timeline of your itinerary

Inspiration

Planning vacations can be hard. Traveling is a very fun experience but often comes with a lot of stress of curating the perfect itinerary with all the best sights to see, foods to eat, and shows to watch. You don't want to miss anything special, but you also want to make sure the trip is still up your alley in terms of your own interests - a balance that can be hard to find.

What it does

explr.ai simplifies itinerary planning with just a few swipes. After selecting your destination, the duration of your visit, and a rough budget, explr.ai presents you with a curated list of up to 30 restaurants, attractions, and activities that could become part of your trip. With an easy-to-use swiping interface, you choose what sounds interesting or not to you, and after a minimum of 8 swipes, let explr.ai's power convert your opinions into a full itinerary of activities for your entire visit.

How we built it

We built this app using React Typescript for the frontend and Convex for the backend. The app takes in user input from the homepage regarding the location, price point, and time frame. We pass the location and price range into the Google API to retrieve the highest-rated attractions and restaurants in the area. Those options are presented to the user on the frontend with React and CSS animations that allow you to swipe each card in a Tinder-style manner. Taking consideration of the user's swipes and initial preferences, we query the Google API once again to get additional similar locations that the user may like and pass this data into an LLM (using Together.ai's Llama2 model) to generate a custom itinerary for the user. For each location outputted, we string together images from the Google API to create a slideshow of what your trip would look like and an animated timeline with descriptions of the location.

Challenges we ran into

Front-end and design require a LOT of skill. It took us quite a while to come up with our project, and we originally were planning on a mobile app, but it's also quite difficult to learn completely new languages such as swift along with new technologies all in a couple of days. Once we started on explr.ai's backend, we were also having trouble passing in the appropriate information to the LLM to get back proper data that we could inject back into our web app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud at the overall functionality and our ability to get something working by the end of the hacking period :') More specifically, we're proud of some of our frontend, including the card swiping and timeline animations as well as the ability to parse data from various APIs and put it together with lots of user input.

What we learned

We learned a ton about full-stack development overall, whether that be the importance of Figma and UX design work, or how to best split up a project when every part is moving at the same time. We also learned how to use Convex and Together.ai productively!

What's next for explr.ai

We would love to see explr.ai become smarter and support more features. explr.ai, in the future, could get information from hotels, attractions, and restaurants to be able to check availability and book reservations straight from the web app. Once you're on your trip, you should also be able to check in to various locations and provide feedback on each component. explr.ai could have a social media component of sharing your itineraries, plans, and feedback with friends and help each other better plan trips.