TravelEx | Devpost

TravelEx Recap generated after a session
TravelEx session in progress, Map View
TravelEx session in progress, List View

Inspiration

Traveling to and exploring big cities is exciting, but it can often feel daunting and overwhelming with so much happening around you. We wanted to make this experience smoother and more enjoyable for everyone. That’s why we built TravelEx, a friend that guides and informs you about your surroundings as you explore.

What it does

TravelEx is an accessible mobile web application designed to be your companion for your next city adventure. Based on your custom prompt, TravelEx highlights relevant locations around you in real time, whether that’s a particular interest, theme, or mood. As you move through the city, spoken descriptions guide you along the way, keeping your hands free and your eyes on the world around you. Once your adventure is complete, TravelEx puts together a trip report with a map of your journey, ready to share with friends.

How we built it

TravelEx is built on Next.js, AWS, Google Maps, LangChain with Fetch.AI, and ElevenLabs. We use Next.js for our frontend and AWS to host our backend, database, and photo storage with Lambdas + API Gateway, DynamoDB, and S3 respectively. We use Google Maps APIs to scout out the initial set of nearby locations and use LangChain to orchestrate Fetch.AI agents to gather information about and filter down nearby places of interest. Finally, in order to have a natural tour guide voice, we stream voice audio from ElevenLabs to the client.

Challenges we ran into

We really took on the challenge to develop a seamless user experience by making the tour guide audio a completely streamed experience. This meant learning about streaming and appending audio chunks as well as website permission issues surrounding audioplay.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of integrating with new technologies such as ElevenLabs and Fetch.AI into our application, providing a feature-rich user experience. We are also proud of the architecture of our application, which is designed to be efficient, robust, and secure by using best practice design patterns and scalable infrastructure. Most importantly, we are proud that this is a product we would personally love to use.

What we learned

First, we learned how to use ElevenLabs to generate automatic voiceovers, enabling natural and engaging audio narration for users. On the agents side, we explored using SDKs to produce structured outputs, improving reliability, consistency, and ease of integration. We also learned the importance of designing a mobile-oriented web application, prioritizing responsiveness and accessibility for travelers on the move. Finally, we gained experience integrating AWS services to support scalable, reliable backend infrastructure for real-world deployments.

What's next for TravelEx

While web applications offer accessibility, most users prefer mobile applications on their personal devices, especially for ones used while traveling. Thus, the most natural next step is to refactor our existing codebase into a mobile application. This transition would also allow TravelEx to better integrate with device-native capabilities, creating a smoother experience for users as they explore.