Inspiration
Foster Nation's mission is to help foster youth growing out of the system. We resonated with this message because we recently also became young adults and faced new uncertainties and difficulties navigating the world with additional responsibilities - considering how much more difficult this would be without the support of our parents, we decided to take on this project to bring a voice to teens and young adults in the foster care system who might lack the resources and care that many of us take for granted.
What it does
We created an AI Chatbot for Foster Nation that first takes the user through a series of questions to determine what kinds of resources would be beneficial, and if they have other questions or don't want to look through the website, we would redirect the user to our question-and-answer chatbot where they can ask our AI any questions they have about Foster Nation's resources and information.
How we built it
We used HTML and CSS to create the user interface of our webpage, which contained the series of questions and links to the Foster Nation website. We used node.js to create the backbone of our project and the Gemini AI to train and develop the AI Chatbot's responses. The Chatbot implementation is based off of a web crawler that only searched through relevant links based on the keywords inputted by the user.
Challenges we ran into
Foster Nation's website limits the number of links you can process with a web crawler, so we limited the number of links to 5, using specific keywords to select links. Additionally, it was difficult to train the AI to recognize words related to the key words from the user input. Also, due to the short time frame of the hackathon, we were not able to connect the HTML page to the node.js code for the Chatbot.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of successfully training our AI model to generate answers to a question, and for creating the website taking the user through a series of questions. It was exciting to be able to work with an AI API for the first time!
What we learned
We learned how to use node.js, HTML, and CSS to create our project. We also learned how to leverage machine models like Gemini using APIs in order to create our own AI interface, prioritizing user friendliness and accessibility.
What's next for Foster Nation AI Chatbot
The next steps for our project is to connect our user interface to the code backbone, where users can access the question answer feature through the HTML website. We would also finish implementing the specific links in our website that redirects the user to specific pages on Foster Nation, and also tells the user more about the resources, including the ones outside of the Foster Nation organization's website.
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