Unravel

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*Github Repo: https://github.com/jas6zhang/Unravel

Inspiration ☁️

As we move on from the pandemic and return to workplaces and schools, it is getting easier to get caught up with the distractions of daily life. Being students ourselves, we have experienced the pressure of balancing multiple things at the same time. Hence, we realize the importance of taking time to reflect on our experiences to gain deeper insights into, and keep in touch with our emotional well-being. That's what inspired us to create Unravel—a functional application that aids as a companion in your daily journaling. Like a string that slowly unravels and becomes free of its burdens, we hope to achieve that same feeling with our app in healing the minds and hearts of people.

What it does 💁‍♂️

Unravel is a modern take on daily journaling. Users are able to write a short journal entry every day with guidance provided by randomly generated prompts. Then, our trained NLP model will perform sentiment analysis and keyword extraction to identify the mood and key topics of the entry that day. Through fun & unique historical data visualization, users can look back at their journals and embrace the highs and lows of their journey thus far. The scope is limitless. Unravel could be used to identify core themes in your life and your sentiment behind them (even better than you may have believed), or even help you unravel that thought you were stuck on! We hope this platform makes journaling just a little bit easier, and that it aids in unravelling your life ahead.

How we built it 🔨

The design + conceptualization occurred on Figma and the front end of the application was built using React, Tailwind & ChakraUI. Our NLP model was implemented using Cohere’s NLP toolkit and trained using multiple open source datasets and extensive preprocessing. After a journal entry is inputted, the model is able to accurately analyze the sentiment and extracts keywords based on the text. Information such as the journal entry, sentiment values, and an associated timestamp is then stored onto a Google Cloud Firestore database. The overall backend was created using the Flask framework that ties the application together with additional features such as user authentication.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 💪

What started as a team of individuals who were still developing strange ideas hours into the hackathon, turned out to produce results beyond our initial expectations. None of us had any experience with NLP technology so there was a deep learning curve in our implementation. As a group, we are incredibly proud to finish our project and one that we feel good about. We collaborated extremely well and ultimately, produced a project that we believe is both functional and inclusive.

What we learned 🧠

Many of our group members were not familiar with technologies such as Firebase, ChakraUI and were exposed to the power of Large Language Models. This hackathon was a perfect way to dive deep into all of these technologies.

What's Next 💼

Unravel has the potential to disrupt the way journaling is done. There are many applications in the market where users can write journal entries comfortably, but none of them incentivize the user to go back and reflect on their emotional well-being. Reflecting upon how you reflect is an undervalued skill. By continuing to use the power of Cohere’s API, we aim to improve upon context-based semantic analysis as well as true natural language processing. Instead of classification to a finite set of labels, we want to provide our customers with deep analysis into their thought patterns. Additional features were actually conceptualized as well, but due to time and scope constraints, they were not implemented. One such example would be a support chat bot to converse with the user, and would be recommended when a trend of negative emotions is indicated.

With our project, we want everyone to unravel.