EaseMe ✔️

Inspiration 💡✨

Many people suffered from depression and other mental illnesses as a result of the pandemic and are still suffering even now that the corona is being contained. Another problem is that counseling, which is considered effective for depression, is not covered by insurance and is expensive. I came up with the idea of having an online counseling service where people can easily talk to each other regardless of their personal income or environment to solve this problem as much as possible. Also, one of our team members said that when feeling depressed, reading maxims from historical figures helps clear your mind and cheer up. We took that idea to create a human-like chatbot that provide counseling to people who are depressed.

What it does 💪✨

EaseMe is an algorithm chatbot allowing you to express your emotional burdens through historical characters. The chatbot will give you some advice from their old quotes, which may inspire people!

How we built it 🧱✨

We used HTML, CSS, and javascript to build the user interface. With bootstrap, we were able to make the webpage responsive. For the backend, we utilized cohere's classify API to process user input, built the algorithm to handle the flow of the conversation using python, and created a server to host the front and backend using flask. The server handles the client’s POST requests and provides a response for the bot to display. We used Figma to design the layout of the frontend.

Challenges we ran into 🧗✨

This was our first time working on a chatbot and also the first time submitting a project to a hackathon for more than half of our team members.

As we have two UX designers and two coders, it was hard to speak in the same language regarding technical perspective and goals. But we started to understand and empathize with each other as we got into the second day of the hackathon.

Originally, we tried to create the machine learning feature utilizing a traditional method with tensorflow and tflearn, after transitioning to using cohere to process the user input, we ran into issues fine-tuning the algorithm and the bot miscategorizing user response.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏆✨

We are proud of looking at our ideas from our brains coming to life. Although we gave up on our weekends and naps, we learned a lot to develop our technical and soft skills. Watching us slowly become a team as we progressed through this hackathon was somewhat magical and made us proud.

We are proud that we were able to accomplish the creation of a series of projects in the limited time of three days, which we have never experienced before, and that we can work together with members from different fields to create one project.

What we learned 🏫✨

Project management, front-end and back-end coding, communication and persuading skills.

What's next for EaseMe 🔮✨

Given more time, we would love to create more layers to the conversation and generate an algorithm for the bot to narrow down the search to develop more relevant quotes for the users. We would like to ensure each historical character has different counselling styles so users can choose their counsellor.

Built With

• Bootstrap
• HTML & CSS
• Python (Flask)
• co:here (ML/AI)
• Figma

Thanks :)