Nova | Devpost

Opening dialogue
Calendar event created
Login page

Inspiration

Siri is stupid. ChatGPT is sandboxed. Nova, on the other hand, is the perfect AI Assistant. Filling the gap between stupidity and incompetence, Nova embodies the pinnacle of the opposites. The idea is to bring the power of the personal assistant to common man.

What it does

Nova uses LLM technology to interact with APIs in order to complete, various tasks, without users needing to say exact phrases to trigger incredibly specific actions (cough, cough, Siri). Great examples currently include calendar event creation and task creation.

How we built it

Users first interact with Nova by opening up our flutter app on either android or iOS. After logging in via Google Auth, users can prompt Nova via voice. After flutter's voice-to-text library has gathered all the text, the text is sent to an instance of llama running on Modal, which returns the AI's response. After parsing and executing LLM function calls, the app forwards the remaining text to Cartesia, which converts the text into Nova's voice, which is then audio streamed via a temporary file to the user.

Challenges we ran into

API's were significantly harder to interact with than we originally thought, leading to many road blocks that had to be overcome.
Llama-8b isn't always the brightest, and needs the occasionally prodding in the prompt engineering.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

"Being able to incorporate all of the eight APIs and getting everything to work together." -Chris, 2 hours of sleep / day
"It feels flippin' magical." -Caleb, 3.5 hours of sleep / day
"It's like trial by fire, I'm just glad to be surviving till the end." -Ethan, 2.5 hours of sleep / day

What we learned

Don't refresh the page while writing out your DevPost Project Story. If you do make that mistake, definitely don't do it twice.
How to prompt engineer
What to expect when dealing with APIs
Commit often
Sometimes simplicity is just better