AboutYou

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  Personality Quiz gives insight into how you could respond to a prompt

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  Generating ideas and prompts for responses for interviews or essays

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  Get feedback on interview response or written answers.

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  Specific AI feedback with help from domain knowledge prompting in college admissions/interviews

Inspiration Most people struggle to reflect meaningfully under pressure, especially when writing college essays or preparing for interviews. I built AboutYou to make that process easier, faster, and more structured — turning reflection into a conversation powered by AI.

What it does AboutYou is an AI-powered web app that guides users through self-reflection, surfaces strong story ideas, and helps them write better essays or interview responses. It dynamically generates follow-up questions, provides multiple story suggestions based on user input, highlights weak phrasing, and even allows users to speak responses out loud via speech-to-text.

How we built it Frontend: React (with React Router), TipTap for rich text editing, Tailwind via shadcn/ui, Framer Motion for smooth transitions.

Backend: NestJS server using OpenAI’s GPT-4 for all text generation and Whisper for audio transcription.

Integration: State is passed between pages via localStorage, follow-ups are generated using OpenAI and inserted dynamically. Backend is hosted locally and tunneled to the frontend (Vercel) via ngrok.

Challenges we ran into

• CORS and ngrok tunneling with a separate frontend deployment
• Managing real-time dynamic question generation
• Engineering prompts to generate clear, well-separated ideas and natural follow-up questions
• Integrating speech recognition that works across browsers
• Designing an editor that’s flexible, accessible, and reactive to feedback

Accomplishments that we're proud of I built the full stack in under 36 hours — from reflection prompts to transcript analysis — and made it feel like a real product. The editor supports speech-to-text, smart AI review, and contextual feedback. The story suggestions are tailored and grounded in user input.

What we learned I got deep hands-on experience with prompt engineering, integrating AI APIs in workflows, and handling all the pieces that make a full-stack app feel seamless.

What's next for AboutYou User authentication, saved responses, and a smarter editor that evolves with feedback. I also want to show this to my friends and random people at college to get feedback on the app.

Built With

• javascript
• nest
• ngrok
• react
• tailwind
• vercel
• vite