spai | Devpost

spai!!!
spai camera
photo album
photo album

Inspiration

At events like nwHacks, we noticed that attendees are often too busy working on their projects to document the exciting conversations and moments they share. This inspired us to create spai, a charming, self-moving robot that not only captures the essence of interactions but also serves as a friendly, free photographer and event companion. spai aims to bridge the gap between productivity and memories, making hackathons more interactive, memorable, and engaging.

What it does

spai is a four-wheeled, AI-powered robot designed to roam around events autonomously.

It approaches attendees, introduces itself, and asks for their names.
Takes pictures of people it meets and stores them in a database, associating each photo with a name.
Displays a fun, real-time grid of all the pictures it captures during the event. Clicking on a photo shows a summary of the conversation associated with it.
Captures key points from conversations about attendees' projects and stores the summaries.
Moves around by itself, seeking out new people to engage with, acting as a perfect event companion.

How we built it

Hardware: We built spai on a simple box with four wheels, fitted with DC motors and an arduino board that help it navigate around obstacles. Using OpenAI’s Text-to-Speech, spai chats naturally with event-goers. Spai captures photos, stores them in a Supabase database, and associates each picture with the person’s name. Leveraging Llama 3, spai can carry on conversations and even summarize key points. Interactive UI: The “spaim-album,” built with Next.js, displays a fun grid of photos that updates in real-time. Clicking a photo reveals the conversation summary, making it easy to relive memories.

Challenges We Ran Into

Diving into local LLMs and hardware was a steep learning curve, especially for non-engineers like us. We bumped into issues like mobile phone permission conflicts interfering with audio outputs from our LLM.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of spai's sustainable design. We repurposed everyday items, using Gatorade bottle caps for wheels, cardboard for the structure, and even a straw to connect the axle made from a coffee stirrer, to build a self-walking robot in an eco-friendly, creative way.