PipTalk

page 0: project opening page
page 1: introduction and basic questionaires
page 1: indepth examining of your interest hobbies etc
page 1: outcome results

Inspiration

When brainstorming, we all identified pain points with finding clubs at USC (clubs having names that didn't match search keywords, long club descriptions, the amount of clubs, etc.) and decided to create an application that addressed those pain points to enhance student experience.

What it does

It is a club advisor chat bot that asks for information about the student (major, gender, interests) and gives a list of recommended student organizations for the user to further explore. It bases its clubs on the RSO list put on the RSO webpage and uses Gemini API calls to get embeddings for users and clubs, and takes the cosine similarity to make club recommendations. It also uses Gemini API and ElevenLabs to output information about recommendations to the user.

How we built it

We divided our project into tasks and assigned them based on interest to team members. We webscraped the RSO website to build a club database on MongoDB and used API calls to Gemini’s embedding creation models to create embeddings for each of the clubs. We also used API calls for the LLM output and used FastAPI to connect our front end and backend. We built our frontend using React Framework and ElevenLab API for speech features.

Challenges we ran into

Backend: Webscraping due to content formatting Database connection FastAPI connection to frontend Using Gemini Free Tier (affected our back end capability) Frontend: React rendering ElevenLabs integration Integration with backend for processing

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of delivering a product that works end-to-end with no shortcuts! Our scope was manageable and still addressed a meaningful problem that many students can relate to, and we were able to completely solve it with our product.

What we learned

Learned how to use new technologies Gained collaboration and communication skills Built a full-stack application Learned how to split a project into smaller tasks for delegation

What's next for PipTalk

We are looking to make small modifications for a more polished MVP for presentation. We also look forward to implementing this in schools or converting this to a more portable format for students to use at a low cost on their own.