Virtual Friend

Are you feeling lonely? Here's an AI friend for you to chat to lighten your day! Chat everything you like and get your answers in seconds! No more depression since you always have someone to talk to!

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Inspiration

We are lonely college student. Everyday we talk to ChatGPT only. Let's make it a chat bot with a face and voice and chat everything with it like a REAL PERSON. We believe by giving AI an appearance we are respecting their identities as sentient and high intelligence being. (+ that's a definition of a good friend we should all have)

What it does

The chat bot is capable of moving the lips just like a real person and think with the most advanced AI to date! You can have a seamless conversion with this new friend about basically anything and it will provide you with sensible sentences and sometimes great insights. It want to be our friends so give it a chance! This product would give more accessibility to ChatGPT where users cannot type or do not know how to write. Also, looking at words all the time could be so boring and lonely and weird. Need someone to talk to? Having depression? Need a study buddy/teacher? Your close-to-everyday-life friend could have (a more visible) form (of your choosing in the later development). In future, you can choose who to talk to, their appearance, voices, you can opt to fan-meet a celebrity or revisit on old loved ones.

How we built it

We add a record function, integrate Google Cloud Speech-to-Text to convert the user speech to text, and ChatGPT to analyze the input and give a response, and D-ID AI to create a face and voice to express the response. The chat room is a web app with React and Express support. It is structured like a video call so that the experience would feel as if in a natural context.

Challenges we ran into

Since all of the tools are new to us, we spent quite some time to discover and understand the approach to each. Our biggest problem was how to stream large speech data from React frontend to Express backend. Our solution was Kafka Streams, which is being used to stream massive amount of data in popular social media like Linkedin. We realized that our web app also functions like social media so the technology would be the best fit. We didn't have enough time to create a working setup. For the meantime, we used file system and few twists to overcome the challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to build a working webapp within a few days. We could generate AI video response and are about to integrate to the web app as a final step!

What we learned

  • Learn REACT
  • Create a record fuction
  • Integrate Google Cloud Speech-to-Text and ChatGPT, D-ID AI

What's next for Virtual Friend

  • Integrate AI video to the app
  • AI talk with various styles and personality
  • Make the conversation smoother by having AI detect silent gaps in users' talking and intepret when users finish the sentences

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