Next Step

Learn how to take your Next Step in insurance education by practicing in high pressure scenarios

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Inspiration

We found that many people are uninformed about how insurance works and how to navigate difficult insurance related situations. Current insurance education relies heavily on static learning through dense textbooks, missing the crucial aspect of real-time application. After recognizing this issue, we created Next Step, which forces you to learn in a realistic, interactive environment.

What Does Next Step Do?

Next Step uses AI-powered conversational scenarios to transform insurance education. Users engage with realistic, time-sensitive situations across three domains that they can select from: Auto, Home, and Health insurance. Each scenario challenges the user, requiring immediate responses that will be graded on a scale from 0 to 100 based on the application of these.

  • Safety Awareness - Prioritizing personal and others' safety first
  • Insurance Knowledge - Understanding coverage, procedures, and timing
  • Procedural Understanding - Following proper steps and protocols
  • Decision-Making Quality - Making choices that minimize risk and cost

How We Built It

Next Step was developed with a modern full-stack architecture that allows for powerful AI to blend with our web technologies. On the frontend, we utilized Next.js with React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS to provide an interactive and responsive user experience. The backend is powered by Flask and Python, ensuring efficient processing and seamless integration with our AI. Fundamentally, Next Step makes use of Vapi, our AI voice agent that drives conversational scenarios to make insurance learning realistic and interactive.

Challenges

One of our biggest challenges was the creation of the idea itself, it took us hours of brainstorming together to finally come up with a solid plan. Another issue was setting up the python virtual environment for the whole team, we ran into technical issues with discrepancies between what commands were needed to activate them on our own machines. We also ran into issues with dynamic page routing since none of us had previous experience with Next.js before. There was also an hour-long problem of trying to track down a connection issue between backend and AI integration. The error being that the API key was never set 🤦. Fortunately, we were able to overcome all of these challenges with the power of teamwork, persistence, and lots of energy drinks.

Accomplishments

We successfully accomplished our goal of transforming the old-fashioned insurance education system into an interactive conversational experience for users to prepare themselves for real-world scenarios. We also were able to learn and adapt to technology we were unfamiliar with on the spot, a crucial skill that we will continue to develop over time.

What We Learned

We learned the basics of NextJS and React, as well as implementing the voice interface design learning how these interactions require different design patterns to focus on conversation flow and context retention. We learned even more about git and github, especially the first time hackers in our team. Most importantly, we learned the power of scenario-based learning over traditional textbooks.

What's the next step for Next Step?

Try saying that again 10 times fast! We plan to add more types of insurance to truly test your knowledge, such as life, business, pet, renters, and more! Enabling you to learn more about different types of insurances and how you can correctly find your through difficult scenarios.

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