Study Buddy

Inspiration

The inspiration behind Study Buddy stems from the desire to make quality academic support accessible to all students, regardless of their circumstances. Many students struggle to find reliable help outside of school hours, especially those who can’t afford tutors or face challenges due to disabilities. Study Buddy was created to fill that gap by providing a friendly, dependable, and interactive study companion that is always available. The goal is to create an inclusive, supportive, and engaging tool that makes learning easier and more enjoyable for everyone.

What it does

Study Buddy is an AI-powered study companion that helps you with academic challenges by providing reliable information, clear explanations, and personalized support. It combines the trusted answers from Wolfram Alpha with the conversational abilities of OpenAI, making it easier to understand difficult subjects. Whether you need help with math, science, or just motivation, Study Buddy is there to guide you through, offering a fun and accessible way to study, without the need for a tutor

How we built it

We built the front end for study buddy with React, Next.js Typescript, HTML and CSS, for a clean, dynamic and responsive User Interface.

In our backend built on Python, we used Flask as well as integrated both the Wolfram Alpha API and the OpenAI API. When the user submits a query or requests help, Next.js makes an API call to the Flask server, which sends this query to OpenAI to get a result.

Challenges we ran into

A common issue working with OpenAI is its lack of accurate answers. To work around it, the team used Wolfram Alpha to ensure we were providing trusted solutions. However, the Wolfram Alpha API’s ability to converse in a friendly manner was insufficient. Both of these API’s lacked in an area that was needed for the final solution. Therefore, we combined these two, ensuring that ChatGPT was the one talking while taking accurate answers from Wolfram Alpha.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

During this 36 hour hackathon we learned many technologies that we were not completely familiar with. A challenge that we faced was not only learning things on the spot, but also combining the technologies we had just learned. Learning how to integrate each of these components with each other, ensuring that each of them were communicating, and that we could see everything was connected was a proud moment.

What we learned

We explored a variety of technologies and learned how to merge them with our existing knowledge to enhance our capabilities using modern frameworks. It was also a valuable learning experience to research and grasp new concepts within a short time frame and then swiftly integrate them into our tech stack. While challenging, it was an intriguing and rewarding process.

What's next for Study Buddy

Study Buddy was created to assist all students, including those with disabilities. As our next step, we're working on implementing a speech-to-text feature, enabling users who can't type on a traditional keyboard to interact with Study Buddy using their voice. Additionally, we aim to introduce a text-to-speech function, allowing users to hear the chatbot's responses and engage in more accessible, conversational interactions. We also want to implement a database to store history so users can return to previous chats!