Vibe Guide: Mood Match

• 

  Vibe Guide personas

• 

  Vibe Guide Pizza Pete

Inspiration

Discovery shouldn't feel like reading a spreadsheet. We wanted to capture the magic of a local friend's recommendation—the specific tone, the bias, and the "vibe" that makes a place special. Vibe Guide turns the cold facts of local search into a conversation with a character who knows the city better than you do.

What it does

Vibe Guide is an AI-powered concierge with 10 distinct voiced personas. By combining Yelp AI's deep business intelligence with advanced tone-shaping and real-time environmental context (weather/time), it provides curated multi-stop itineraries. Users can switch personas instantly to get a different perspective on the same query, hear their recommendations via high-quality TTS, and make instant reservations for the spots they love.

How we built it

Frontend: Expo (React Native) SDK 54 for a fluid, native iOS experience.

Intelligence: Yelp AI chat/v2 handles the heavy lifting of business search and persistent chat context.

Personality: Apple LLM (local) and OpenAI act as the "creative director," rewriting Yelp's factual data into specific persona voices while preserving entity details.

Voice: ElevenLabs TTS provides the auditory soul of the personas, with <3s latency achieved through pre-bundled greeting clips and stream-caching.

Context: OpenWeatherMap API and local time sensors inject real-time atmosphere into every response.

Challenges we ran into

Latency Masking: Balancing the high quality of ElevenLabs TTS with the "instant" expectations of a chat app was tough. We solved this with a "Greeting Clip" strategy that plays immediate pre-recorded audio while the longer response is being synthesized.

Entity Preservation: Keeping Yelp's factual accuracy (addresses, prices, ratings) intact while giving the AI total creative freedom over tone required rigorous prompt engineering and testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Voice Performance: Achieving sub-3s time-to-first-audio makes the characters feel alive rather than like a loading bar.

Visual Harmony: Each persona has a unique color palette and animated state that reflects their personality.

What we learned

The "Agentic" shift in APIs: Working with Yelp AI's structured chat output is a game-changer compared to traditional REST endpoints for discovery.

Persona-first design: Users can engage much more deeply when the interface has a "who" behind the "what."

What's next for Vibe Guide: Mood Match

Real-time Map Layers: Visualizing the multi-stop journeys on a dynamic map.

Group Vibes: Sharing curated itineraries with friends in a "shared session."

Social Personas: Allowing users to create and share their own localized concierge voices.

Built With

• apple-llm
• elevenlabs
• expo.io
• openai
• react-native