WhatMail

Understand and chat with any document in your language.

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Inspiration

As immigrants, our parents struggle to understand the letters they receive in the mail. Typically, they reach out to us for help but we're not always able to help them as we all live a busy life. Ultimately, they cannot function independently in the US due to such limitations, especially since mail is the preferred form of communication for important institutions.

What it does

WhatMail allows anyone to take a picture of their letter(s) or any documents and instantly receive an explanation in their own native language. Our users can then chat with the explanation to get any questions instantly answered about the document provided.

How we built it

We used an OCR API which takes any photos that include text and turns it into a computer-readable text format. This allows us to interact and analyze the text in any document the user captures. Once the text is extracted from the photo. We use ChatGPT along with special prompting to break down the document into a simple and readable format. You can also choose your own language if you'd like the response in your native tongue.

Challenges we ran into

  • OCR is not as great as we thought. However, with some extra processing, we got it to a working condition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We completed market research
  • Created a working mvp, it's not staged, and fully deployed.
  • We addressed two feasibility risks: [1] can we deliver meaningful explanations? [2] can we process various document types?

What we learned

  • How to use OCR
  • Deployed on nextJS for the first time.

What's next for WhatMail

Tomorrow, we're sharing WhatMail with our friends and family first, to get their feedback. We want to ensure we're building a meaningful solution to a real problem and this will be how we'll validate our approach. If needed, we'll iterate our product. Once we've validated our solution, we'll begin accepting payment and bring our product to market. From there we'll continue to build, learn, and iterate until we have a growing company.

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