SheCounts

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by the financial challenges women face, like the gender pay gap, lower workforce participation, and caregiving duties. We wanted to create a platform that helps women manage their finances confidently.

What We Learned

We learned a lot about women's financial needs and how to address them. We improved our understanding of financial literacy and budgeting while also honing our web development and design skills.

How We Built It

We started with planning and research to identify key features: budget calculators, a chatbot, and an expense tracker with reminders. We designed the interface, focusing on simplicity and ease of use. For development, we used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, integrating Vue.js for dynamic components. Our chatbot leverages the Gemini LLM for conversational intelligence and DistilBERT vector embeddings to transform financial resources into searchable vectors. When the LLM's response is incorrect or incomplete, the chatbot queries a Pinecone vector database hosted on AWS to retrieve relevant financial information, enhancing its knowledge and providing more accurate answers to user queries. Usability testing helped us refine the platform to ensure it was user-friendly and responsive.

Challenges

Integrating multiple features seamlessly was tough, as was ensuring real-time data updates. Designing an easy-to-use interface required several iterations. We also had to ensure our financial advice and tools were accurate.

Future Plans

Due to time constraints, the chatbot only has access to roughly 80 financial resources split across 10 topics, which would not be sufficient for a large-scale implementation of this project. In the future, we plan to use web scraping mechanisms to have the database update automatically periodically. Also, we plan to offer a more advanced version of the budget calculator by including more financial components. We would like to tie the total costs on the reminders section with the monthly budget calculator.

Conclusion

Despite these challenges, we're proud of our platform and believe it will empower women to take control of their finances.

Built With

• css
• distilbert
• gemini
• html
• huggingface
• javascript
• pinecone
• python