Spoti-Cry

An app where if the user is feeling unsafe, they can either trigger an AI agent call to themselves or send a message to their emergency contact with information about their location.

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Inspiration

According to a recent Gallup poll, personal safety fears are at a three decade high in the United States—about 40% of adults are scared of walking home alone. And of course, the fear of walking alone at home at night is much higher among women—53%—than men—26%.

What it does

Spoti-Cry is an app designed to be a companion for those who have to walk alone. The UI/UX is intentionally styled to resemble Spotify, making it appear inconspicuous. Its main feature is a button that instantly connects the user to a human-sounding AI chatbot, which pretends to be a friend or family member waiting for them, creating the illusion that they are not alone to deter potential threats. Another feature is a panic button, which takes a photo of the user and alerts an emergency contact of their location.

How we built it

We prompt-engineered using Google Gemini to feed into Bland API, an AI voice agent. We built our app with React and Expo. We used Twilio’s API to send texts to emergency contacts and Expo Camera to capture the user's image.

Challenges we ran into

We changed our tech stack many, many, many times. We explored everything from Streamlit to Python. We eventually chose React Native based on the advice of an amazing mentor, Dylan. None of us knew React that well, so learning how to build a fully functional mobile app that integrates an AI chat bot and prompt engineering was new for us. Finally, finding a god AI voice agent (more importantly a free one) and integrating that with the Gemini API was also one of the biggest challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of aiming for a fairly complicated implementation required project and yet managing to finish most of the functionality we planned on doing in a short period of time.

What we learned

We learned how to work together as a team, how to learn new technologies in a short period of time, how to ask for help when needed, how to unlearn and relearn and more importantly how to read lots and lots of documentation!!

What's next for Spoti-Cry

There were many features we discussed in our ideation phase that werent able to come to life in this span of 24 hours. However, some things we would love to implement in the future are:

  1. Using OTP generation from Firebase for user login
  2. Making the AI agent on call help contact the emergency contact when prompted by the user to do so.
  3. Implementing database functionality.
  4. Adding a 911 call button as a last resort.
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