rendAIvous.

landing page
hangout hub where hangouts can be planned

Inspiration

In the era of hustle culture and academic "lockins," we often struggle to find time to spend with friends. Our calendars are filled, making it hard to squeeze in a fun hangout with those we love and care about. We found that it often took a handful of screenshots of our calendars, long chains of texts, and a big chunk of time just to plan a quick lunch with our friends, especially as we recently became commuter students. Why were we spending more time planning the hangout than actually hanging out?? We want to make having fun and spending time with friends spontaneous again, instead of feeling like just another task on our calendars. Let rendAIvous handle the logistics so you handle the memories!

What it does

Meet rendAIvous, a platform that makes connecting with your friends easier by leveraging AI tools to coordinate availability and inspire meaningful moments to share. Simply connect your Google Calendar, add your friends, and our AI assistant will find shared windows of time where you are all free, suggest potential activities based on personal preferences, time of day, and weather, and automatically send invites to all attendees. It can even send reminders to hangout with friends you might not have seen in a while!

How we built it

Frontend: React.js with a responsive dashboard for friends, groups, and hangout history. Backend: Node.js and Express for handling friend requests, activity suggestions, and calendar data. Database: Firebase user authentication through Google accounts APIs: Google Calendar API to read free/busy times. AI Gemini Assistant: Gemini is used for interpreting activity recommendations and natural language suggestions.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of trouble integrating the APIs within our website for both Google calendar and Gemini. We also had trouble creating a working Chatbox that used the APIs datas. During these challenges, we found help in mentors and peers to figure out how to come up with a solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully implemented real-time friend addition and hangout tracking.
Created a working prototype where AI can suggest activities
Learning how to use APIs within the span of 24 hours and utilising the data that was extracted from them.

What we learned

How to integrate multiple APIs (Google Calendar, Gemini, Firebase) in a React app.
Handling state management for a complex dashboard with friends, groups, and calendar data.
Team collaboration under time constraints in a hackathon environment.

What's next for rendAIvous.

rendAIvous has the potential to be more broadly implemented in the workforce to help automatically find optimal meeting times for distributed teams and use AI to suggest best meeting formats (e.g., async vs live) based on participants’ time zones, focus hours, or energy levels. This would save productivity hours, reduce fatigue, and improve well-being. We also want to improve the technical functionalities of our application since we still have a lot to learn in that domain. rendAIvous is also a great way to collect user data in terms of activity preferences to understand market and consumer behaviour. Overall, we believe that rendAIvous has many more user needs and stories that it can fulfill and we hope to build it to its full potential.