Here at Yeti, we know just how important it is to remain on the cutting edge of technology.
Over the past 12+ years our team’s ability to embrace emerging technologies has been the cornerstone for consistently delivering profoundly impactful products - and to be honest, experimenting with new technologies is just plain fun for us! Not only does it rejuvenate our love for innovation - it fuels our adventurous spirit.
AI has take the world by storm this year, with AI-powered applications proliferating across nearly every domain imaginable. These revolutionary new tools are allowing users to accomplish an incredibly impressive array of tasks in mere seconds - from creating captivating digital artwork to crafting blog articles and even designing polished print materials - AI has extended its reach to virtually every creative endeavor imaginable.
This recent wave of AI technology has had us itching to get our hands dirty and begin unearthing the countless possibilities it presents. To facilitate this, we organized an AI hackathon that tasked participants with conceiving, designing, and developing an AI powered application… all within a single day.
The Yetis were split into four teams and asked to showcase AI’s potential to transform our digital landscape. Keep reading to see what we built!
At Yeti, building relationships through empathy is one of our core values - so fostering a team environment where our members' connections are vibrant and meaningful is incredibly important to us. As a remote team, a few of the ways we accomplish this is through a daily all-team meeting and an active, fun and conversational Slack channel.
To help facilitate discussion and team bonding, every morning a team member presents a “question of the day”, which is subsequently discussed via slack and during our all-team meeting. Additionally, every Friday, we play a remote-friendly game during our all-team meeting. Unfortunately, after 3+ years of doing this, we’ve found that generating new questions daily can be difficult - as can choosing a game that appeals to everyone on Fridays.
To help solve this problem, one of our teams created Prompt Buddy - a ChatGPT powered app that generates engaging daily questions, motivational messages, and fun Friday games with the click of a button.
To help demonstrate ChatGPT’s endless use cases, the designers and developers on the Prompt Buddy team decided to switch roles during this project, with developers designing the visual elements, and designers coding the application. To help bridge their knowledge gaps, each team member turned to ChatGPT, relying on its step-by-step guidance to accomplish their respective tasks successfully.
Additionally, our "designers" harnessed the power of AI design tools such as randoma11y, an incredibly useful application that generates harmonious color schemes, and Dall-E, an AI system that can create realistic images and art - and which allowed the team to generate a Prompt Buddy logo in seconds.
ChatGPT played a pivotal role in the Prompt Buddy app, serving as the driving force behind generating coherent responses to users' requests, providing them with the question of the day, Friday games, and motivational messages.
Several members of the Yeti team are currently parents of young children and, as anyone familiar with toddlers can attest, have found themselves faced with the perennial challenge of providing satisfying answers to a ceaseless stream of "why" inquiries. To solve this problem, the Why Bot team went to work on an app that could cater to the inquisitive minds of both curious children and deep-thinking philosophers alike.
Why Bot uses a simple speech-to-text interface that allows users to ask questions, receive answers, and delve deeper by requesting simplified explanations. The app’s integration with OpenAI's language model generates coherent responses based on the user's queries.
Because the Why app primarily targets children the team made a deliberate choice to incorporate speech-to-text technology. This decision enables users to interact with the app independently, eliminating the requirement to spell, adhere to grammar rules, or even write. By adopting this approach, the app becomes accessible to users of nearly all ages, enhancing its usability and inclusivity.
To further enhance the usability of the app, the team additionally discussed potentially enhancing the app with added voice capabilities, allowing for a conversational experience. If implemented, this feature would eliminate the need for a user to have the ability to read in order to interact with the app.
Inspired by the concept from Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" our third hackathon team conceived of an app that provides users with real-time translation of any spoken language called “bAIbelfish”.
With the bAIbelfish app, users can speak their native language into a microphone in their browser. Once the audio file has been captured, the app then transcribes the audio file, translates it into the language selected by the user, and then generates, a spoken audio file in the language the users has selected - allowing users to have an AI spoken conversation with nearly anyone in the world.
The bAIbelfish team utilized various AI tools to create the app’s components, including the Whisper model for audio-to-text transcription and the text DaVinci model for language translation. Additionally, they integrated a Google Cloud text-to-voice service to convert the translated text into spoken audio.
As mentioned earlier, the Yeti team answers and discusses a daily question in Slack as a fun team building activity. These questions are generally related to personal experience, such as “What was your favorite vacation as a child” or “if you could be the best in the world at one activity, what would it be?”
Building off of this, one of our hackathon teams created an AI generated trivia game that utilizes each team members responses from the "question of the day" activity. The team aimed to aggregate years' worth of responses from team members' conversations in Slack and generate to custom trivia questions (and answers) about each individual on the team.
To achieve this, the team exported the chat history from Slack into separate JSON files, organized by day. They then wrote a script to combine all the JSON files into one large JSON object.
To generate the questions, the team pulled all of the messages with the word “question” in it - this provided ChatGPT with all of the necessary context to understand the question being asked. They then pulled each of the responses to question. All of this data was then sent the OpenAI API, which yielded a large number of questions and answers that could be utilized for a team trivia game.
To utilize all of these questions, the team then put together a Jeopardy style interface with question categories that included a series of questions with increasing difficulty.
During the app demo, the entire Yeti team was able to successfully play a game of Yeti Team Trivia and had an amazing time!
All in all, we think that the first Yeti AI hackathon was an unequivocal success! The process served as an exciting catalyst for exploration and experimentation, and allowed our entire team to delve into the vast potential of AI and showcase it’s versatility in enhancing digital products of all kinds.