Beginning Anew - practicing reconciliation

Inspiration

My biggest inspiration was to bring a really helpful mindfulness practice to life in an accessible way. I wanted this to be an app that was easy to use, and while being text-based, also including more visual content in a creative way.

What it does

This is a mindfulness guide that can help the user through the mindfulness exercise of "Beginning anew". It is done to help with reconciliation and healing difficult relationships. The coach will guide the users through the 4 steps of the exercise:

• Flower watering
• Sharing regrets
• Expressing hurt
• Sharing difficulty and asking for support.

This can be helpful for someone who wants to practice before having a real face-to-face Beginning Anew conversation with someone. Or if they do not have the capacity to have the conversation with the person (due to for example geographical distance or emotional distance) it can be a tool to reconcile with that person within yourself.

context The app first gives the user an introduction to the exercise and what it is. It then asks the user to provide context for the relationship (name of the person + what relationship you have with that person) so it can give more relevant answers in the chatbot.

chatbot The chatbot will then guide the user through the 4 steps. There were several UX considerations taken into account for the chatbot:

• In the first message the chatbot promts the user to write "hello" to start. It can sometimes be hard to get things rolling and the user may not know what to do with such new technology. So giving a promt makes it easier for the user to start interacting. -Ascii art illustrations: To break up the text as well as to illustrate the growth you can have with this exercise I made the chatbot showcase ASCII art for each step. This symbolizes watering the seeds of reconciliation.
• Bold text for each step: I bolded the text for the name of each step to also guide the process of understanding what the purpose of the step is
• Poem at the end: I added a poem at the end that the user could use for their everyday mindfulness practice. The poem should be based on the topics that the user expressed during the conversation.
• Putting the illustrations and ppoem as code snippets also made it easier to see and understand

How we built it

I mainly used prompt engineering to create this with the existing PartyRock features. The ASCII art was the hardest to make work as well as function in a consistent way. I ended up having to create static texts with the specific ASCII art I wanted. The chatbot could then use the static text as a widget it would call and just display. The reason I wanted ASCII art is to 1) make the chatbot less text-heavy 2) not always have to rely on generated images 3) make the images consistent for the different steps

Challenges we ran into

The ASCII art was a challenge. I had to find ASCII art that could be displayed as a code snippet, as it wasn't clear when it converted it to show as code. Since I ended up using static text widgets the bottom of the app is also not the prettiest since I tried to hide the art underneath.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to build a LLM bot from scratch and focusing on creative ways of making it more illustrative

What we learned

This was my first time prompt engineering, which was very fun. It was hard to make the bot work consistetly, but ended up being happy with the result.

What's next for Beginning Anew - practicing reconciliation

• Testing with real people and iterating on feedback
• Checking more edge cases and potential malicious use. Designing it to be more robust for that.

Built With

• partyrock