Project Overview: AskClerkly - Your AI-Powered Civic Assistant

Inspiration

The genesis of AskClerkly. stemmed from a pervasive, yet often overlooked, real-world problem: the severe fragmentation of local civic information and community event listings. In many cities, vital details about recycling schedules, town hall meetings, local workshops, and community gatherings are scattered across countless disparate websites, social media groups, and physical bulletin boards. This "boring but painful" problem leads to significant user frustration, missed opportunities for community engagement, and underutilized local resources. Our initial idea for a civic chatbot was refined to ensure it offered a truly unique value proposition, moving beyond existing solutions to create a comprehensive, AI-driven hub for local knowledge and connection.

How I Built It

AskClerkly. was rapidly developed as a Progressive Web Application (PWA) within the Bolt.New no-code hackathon environment, leveraging a powerful stack to achieve full-stack functionality:

• Bolt.New: Served as the primary development platform, enabling the swift creation of the responsive PWA frontend and orchestrating backend integrations with minimal coding. Also I utilize the Browserstack for IOS functionality and Gemini and ChatGPT for help and pre-making initial prompts for each day.
• Supabase: Provides the robust backend infrastructure, managing user authentication, storing user profiles, and housing our curated database of local events and civic information (e.g., recycling schedules, specific local FAQs).
• Dappier: Powers our custom Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) model. Dappier is crucial for ingesting data from: still work in progress. Large Language Models (LLMs): Integrated via Dappier, these models provide the core AI intelligence, enabling natural language understanding (NLU) to interpret user queries, retrieve relevant information from Dappier's augmented knowledge base, and generate concise, accurate, and personalized responses.
• Stripe: Implemented for secure payment processing, specifically enabling users to promote their events through a seamless checkout experience.
• Entri: Attached custom Ionos domain and email to the project. Netify: Deployment on Netify and hook up the domain was a breeze.

Challenges I Ran Into

Building AskClerkly was an exciting journey, but not without its hurdles:

• Initial Idea Differentiation: One of the earliest challenges was ensuring our concept was sufficiently distinct from existing community platforms, particularly a "Smore app" in New York City. This led to a broader, more generalized approach focused on universal civic information and event discovery.
• Stripe Integration: Getting the Stripe payment system to work flawlessly was a significant challenge. This involved correctly configuring API keys, handling webhooks for post-payment updates, and ensuring secure client-side and server-side interactions.
• Dappier RAG Model Fine-Tuning: Optimizing the Dappier RAG model to consistently provide highly accurate and contextually relevant answers from diverse data sources (both our Supabase data and external feeds) still requires more work
• Data Sourcing Strategy: While Dappier simplifies ingestion, identifying and integrating reliable, structured data feeds for events and civic information was an ongoing process.
• Legal & Compliance Considerations: Attaching a real domain and planning monetization necessitated a rapid understanding and implementation of basic privacy policy and terms & conditions, even for a beta product.
• Bolt challenges: While initial setup was straightforward with carefully planned prompts, managing the project directory's growth became challenging. Bolt occasionally veered off-track, and we encountered rate limits multiple times.
• IOS: Apple is very restrictive about how it shows websites so getting the code right to show and install app was a painful challenge especially for me who never coded anything.

What's Next for AskClerkly.com

AskClerkly is just beginning its journey. Future plans include:

• Enhanced Service & Announcement Integration: Expanding the scope to include more comprehensive local services and official announcements, making the chatbot an even more indispensable civic tool.
• Monetization Expansion: Fully implementing the merchandise store (e.g., T-shirts with fun texts) and a "Support Our Cause" donation option, further diversifying revenue streams for sustainability.
• Multi-Language Support: Integrating Lingo, a hackathon sponsor, to make AskClerkly.com accessible to a broader, multilingual audience, enhancing inclusivity.
• Advanced AI Capabilities: Exploring more sophisticated AI features, such as multi-turn conversations, deeper personalization based on user behavior, and proactive event suggestions. Broader Data Ingestion: Continuously integrating more official city APIs, community organization feeds, and other relevant data sources to ensure the most comprehensive and up-to-date information.
• Community Features: Introducing features that allow users to contribute to the platform, such as submitting local tips or community-led initiatives (with moderation).
• Find funding and team: while MVP is somewhat ready, without funding or good team usually where ideas hit the roadblock.

Challenges for Prizes

We will be submitting AskClerkly.com for the following prize challenges:

• Custom Domain Challenge
• Deploy Challenge
• Startup Challenge

Built With

• bolt
• entri
• ionos
• netlify
• pwa
• react-native
• sql
• stripe
• supababase