Excursionist

💡 Inspiration

The inspiration behind the Excursionist app is to address the challenges faced by travelers when visiting a new place by providing them with a curated app that informs them about the culture, customs, amenities, and emergency contacts.

🔥 What it does

The Excursionist app is a buddy app for travelers that provides a range of features to make their travel experience more enjoyable and stress-free. The app promotes cultural diversity and aims to make travelers feel familiar with the rich diversity of the place they are visiting. Overall, the app aims to provide a one-stop-shop solution for travelholics, allowing them to learn about different cultures, explore attractions, and stay secure while traveling.

⚙️ How we built it

It uses a GPT model to generate information about any place in the world and uses Google's Places API to display a wide range of attractions in the vicinity of the searched location and Pixabay API to generate images as well. The app uses the Folium library to display the map and pinpoint the nearest attractions as chosen by the user. Moreover, a smart SOS service is set up that automatically recognizes the country name on the basis of the destination entered and provides emergency contacts through the Emergency Number API. The app in itself is built using Streamlit in python.

🫥 Challenges we ran into

Setting up 4 APIs together and coherently making them functional was a challenge in itself.
Emergency numbers are region/country specific. Hence another API was used to fetch the emergency contact details.
The API for the GPT model, though easily available required a great deal of tuning to produce the desired results, in the desired format.

😍 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We didn't want to restrict the traveller by specifically asking them for a country/city name. They can literally enter the name of any region across the globe and our smart app will locate the amenities for them.
When in an alien place, cultural barrier poses to be a huge challenge. In this app, we have a designated space where you can learn about the customs and general etiquettes of the place so that it becomes easy for you to blend in.
It is important to be safe while travelling. The emergency contacts are just a click away.

📈 What we learned

Learned how to make use of GPT models' API and tweak the queries in such a way that they provide the desired results.
Learned how to generate random but location specific images and display them on the app.
Got to know about Emergency Number API and explored its use case.