Hiểu Chưa

Witness Vietnamese language evolves in real time. Powered by people, defined by culture. Through Perplexity's SONAR.

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Inspiration

Too much brainrot, not enough meaning.

As someone who has spent half their life away from my beautiful home in Vietnam, it isn't easy to stay in touch with the culture, especially with fast digital media moves. Because of this, I've set out to solve this by documenting not simply languages but all phenomena in my country through "hieu chua", which means "Do you get it yet?" in English.

P.S. Please hire me perplexity, I'm a Software Engineer + Content Creator 1.3M+ subs :)

What it does

Just search any topic/word you seek the meaning of, and the definition will appear regardless of whether it has been documented or not. Similar to Urban Dictionary.

How we built it

Frontend: React.js + Tailwind CSS

Backend: Express.js hosted on Railway

Database: Supabase (PostgreSQL)

Authentication: Firebase Auth (Google & email/password)

AI Integration: I utilized Perplexity's SONAR to gather reliable and relevant data for the user. Used Google Gemini to create natural Vietnamese conversation examples

Challenges we ran into

  • Prompt engineering and tuning for the best search results from Perplexity. I think there are still things that I haven't optimized that I'd love to work on further.
  • Vietnamese slang is hard to model due to its informal, context-heavy nature. Generating accurate and funny explanations without being uncanny valley is hard, but WIP.
  • Need ways to avoid sensitive topics, but currently, all definitions need to be approved to be officially listed on the site.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a working MVP that returns both human and AI-generated definitions based on user input INSTANTLY Documenting these words will reduce redundant AI calls for definitions in the long run Created a full moderation pipeline with admin/volunteer approval workflows Integrated Firebase Auth, Supabase, and Gemini/Perplexity into a seamless developer and user experience Designed a responsive UI that works beautifully across mobile and desktop

What we learned

Perplexity is nice, and I get to leverage that to ship meaningful products fast :)

What's next for Hiểu Chưa

I'm going all in and expanding Perplexity to translating more stuff, with context + meaning for things like songs, linking articles for sources of definitions,.. etc

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