Live Site: https://semantics.onrender.com/
DevPost: https://devpost.com/software/pro-fessional
"You have to learn to write like a man." As women who are recently starting out our professional careers, we have found that communicating and networking through emails can be difficult, and receiving feedback is very important when we are still learning to interact in a professional manner. That's why we built SEM:ANTICS, to help people identify their writing weaknesses. This way, users are able to create positive impressions & maintain professional relationships.
SEM:ANTICS is a comprehensive platform that allows users to edit emails, store their past emails, and gives advice for students, managers, and employees to effectively learn to communicate to a professional standard.
It gives tooltip recommendations for each email based on a data-set compiled of positive, negative and neutral habits that are used in their writing. Email writers can continually submit email drafts (receiving multiple pieces of feedback) until they complete a certified professional draft. SEM:ANTICS also records all changes after each draft writing, so after completion, the user can review it at any time and see how they have improved.
Our framework encourages users to:
- Draft their emails to a professional standard
- Reflect on previous drafts and reinforce their learning
- Test themselves using their own old emails and template emails provided
SEM:ANTICS makes it easy to learn how to navigate the public professional sphere, while fine-tuning your own communication style in a way that will leave a positive impression regardless of the recipient.
SEM:ANTICS is based off a team-compiled database sourced from various professional blogs about professional email etiquette (e.g., Indeed, Glassdoor, University of Toronto). The front-end is created using React and the back-end is created using Node.js. Design and prototype were first created on pen and paper and then replicated in React.
As a team we needed a refresher on how to use React and Bootstrap. Learning to create the endpoint and routes was difficult because we needed to plan out which languages and APIs were going to be used.
We had difficulty collecting the data for our example database for our cohere API but we successfully compiled a sizable amount (100 for each category, 300 total).
As aspiring professional women, we're proud to have created a useful website for young women to develop their communication skills and become better positioned for success in a professional sphere.
We are also proud of how our aesthetically minimalistic interface keeps attention on our message being conveyed, reinforce learning and be pleasing to the eye.
Throughout the hackathon, we learned the importance of teamwork. By collaborating together we created a mindmap of our product, curated our database and connect a live front-end and back-end. Being back in person also reminded us how enjoyable it is collaborating with our teammates in person!
Technologically we learned:
- Cohere's API
- Using Bootstrap and React to design a seamless front end
- Using Firebase as a database to store user's previous emails
- convert webapp to a browser extension (add-on) for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge
- create a standalone app for Windows ad Mac