yapyap

Inspiration

Whether you’re thriving in life or really going through it, research shows that writing down your thoughts throughout the day has many benefits. We wanted to add a social element to this valuable habit and build a sense of community through sharing and acknowledging each other’s feelings. However, even on the internet, we've noticed that it is difficult for people to be vulnerable for fear of judgement, criticism, or rejection.

Thus, we centred our problem around this challenge and asked the question: How might we create a sense of community and connection among journalers without compromising their sense of safety and authenticity when sharing their thoughts?

What it does

With Yapyap, you can write daily journal entries and share them anonymously with the public. Before posting, our AI model analyzes your written entry and provides you with an emotion, helping to label and acknowledge your feelings.

Once your thoughts are out in the world, you can see how other people's days are going too and offer mutual support and encouragement through post reactions.

Then, the next day comes, and the cycle repeats.

How we built it

After careful consideration, we recognized that most users of our app would favour a mobile version as it is more versatile and accessible throughout the day. We used Figma to create an interesting and interactive design before implementing it in React Native. On the backend, we created an API using AWS Lambda and API Gateway to read and modify our MongoDB database. As a bonus, we prepared a sentimental analyzer using Tensorflow that could predict the overall mood of the written entry.

Challenges we ran into

Learning new technologies and figuring out how to deploy our app so that they could all communicate were huge challenges for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to apply what we learned about the new technologies in an efficient and collaborative way. We're also proud of getting a Bidirectional RNN for sentiment analysis ready in a few hours!

What we learned

How to easily deal with merge conflicts, what it's like developing software as a group, and overall just knowing how to have fun even when you're pulling an all-nighter!

What's next for yapyap

More personable AI Chatbots, and more emotions available for analysis!

Built With

Submitted to

nwHacks 2024
- Winner Community & Connection Track Prize
- Winner Best Design Project

Created by

I worked on the research, user experience and interface design, and presentation for yapyap. UI illustrations and some icons were created in Adobe Illustrator, and the wireframes and high-fidelity prototype were all done in Figma.

Samantha Yeung
I used AWS serverless-application-model to setup our backend API and database. This was my first experience working with AWS and learned a lot setting up and maintaining the API.

Alvicorn Tsang
I worked on the frontend of yapyap, primarily working in React Native and expo. I've never made a mobile app or used React Native, so it was great fun learning everything! My main challenge was working out how to connect the frontend to the backend.

Robbie Laughlen
I created the sentiment analysis model with TensorFlow, and helped develop the frontend with React Native. It was my first time creating a mobile app, so I faced a lot of issues along the way, but I'm glad to have learnt a lot.

Franklin Ma