Friday

Your personal finance guru to help you reach your money goals. Empowering, intuitive, adaptive. Just text +1 (548) 488-4134

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Inspiration

In these difficult economic times, many of us are looking to improve our financial behavior. So we may look for a budgeting app to help alleviate our financial stress. Unfortunately, by and large, these apps just don’t work. In an American Psychological Association (APA) survey, Stress in America, 6 of 10 U.S. adults said their biggest personal stressor is money and the lack of financial literacy cost Americans $415 billion in 2020. Why is that?

Confusing complexity: For many apps, the bells and whistles can be unnecessarily complicated. It becomes time consuming to figure out the array of labels, tags and hashtags to sort out transactions.

Miscategorizations: Apps like Mint also cannot process nuanced transactions and require maintenance to stay accurate. A bag of flaming hot Cheetos at the gas station is categorized as gas, and Amazon purchases — which could be almost anything — are just “online shopping.” Not to mention paying back friends using e-transfer of cash. None of that is captured.

Lack of other Resources: There were also no other resources outside of tracking spending. The information is backwards looking and does not provide actionable advice for the future besides just stop spending.

Lack of Accountability: Over time, notifications get lost in the myriad of other alerts and eventually the user stops checking them altogether.

Guilt-inducing: It feels like budgeting = guilt about spending. It tells you that spending is bad and to stop doing it. It nags you when you go over budget, until you eventually decide to ignore it. Often, it feels like the budget is controlling you, rather than the other way around.

We decided that there has got to be a better way.

What it does

So we decided to build a better way. Meet Friday, your personal finance guru who helps you meet your money goals and have fun doing it. Friday is a next generation AI powered assistant who helps you achieve financial freedom. No more complex UIs or crowding notifications. Tracking expenses have never been easier. Just text Friday like you would a friend, telling her what you spent and where and she’ll do the rest. She can understand everything - just try it yourself! Text +1 (548) 488-4134

If you need some motivation or inspiration, Friday’s got you. She’ll remember your past conversations and keep you on track using personalized tips. The conversation based support helps you learn how to meet long term financial goals. Empowering and Engaging Intuitive and Easily Accessible Adaptive and Helpful

Friday is an AI assistant that allows you to save money with just a simple text!

How we built it

Friday’s technology stack is as follows: 1. Python: The beloved application development language of Friday. 2. Django: Friday’s Python based back-end server and database. 3. Twilio: Friday uses Twilio API to send and receive SMS. 4. RESTful API: Friday uses a custom built REST API to handle it’s core functionalities 5. GPT-3: Friday leverages OpenAI’s state of the art AI model with over 175 Billion parameters.

Before we even touched any code we spent some time to create a list of all the functions that we desired Friday to accomplish. Then we created a state diagram representing the functional ‘flow’ of how the application would work, it would register a user, determine the intent of the users message, make the associating calls to modify the database, and generate an extremely smart response!

Challenges we ran into

Fine-tuning the AI model: At the initial stages of development we found a low accuracy for Friday’s AI powered classification and completion tasks. One of the major challenges we had to overcome was designing multiple examples/training data for all the AI functions such that it would optimize for accuracy.

Back-end development: We had little prior experience with setting up an entire fully functional server along with a database that could also handle all the desired functions. So the task of doing so for implementing this project seemed unbelievably daunting. The biggest challenge here was figuring out how to properly modularize each function and take a divide and conquer approach in order to get the most done within 24-hours.

Interfacing the complete techstack: This project had several moving parts! Stitching together all the modules we had was definitely one of the most surprising challenges due to the sheer number of components the project consisted of.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What’s amazing about this app is that you can try it yourself without the need to download anything, just text +1 (548) 488-4134!

We are so proud to be able to use GPT-3 in such a complex and challenging way. We were successful in replicating a complex system that can logically remember every user and their unique budgets, transactions and conversations independently from other users. This integration is far beyond the capability of GPT-3 and allows for unbelievable capabilities in budget tracking. For example, it can break down a complex sentence of multiple transactions to simple parts and be able to store it into a database, while interpreting that data to make better responses and advice.

What we learned

I've learned just how for AI and NLP technology has progressed in recent years. There are so many applications of this technology. In the right hands, it can become the most power tool, not just for conversation, but for generating data, visualizations, creating code, classifications and so much more.

What's next for Friday

We would love to see our assistant Friday to be able to be a standalone Service that can be integrated into any situation where speaking or texting is the key way of communication. We would like to be able to integrate her functionality into chat and services like Discord, websites, iOS apps, or even Amazon Alexa! And the other big improvement we’d like to make would be to enable Friday to understand conversation from multiple people at once and group budgeting.

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