App’s Inspiration and Goal

Living in the age of coronavirus, the time spent online & communicating with others online has skyrocketed. In these online conversations connecting with our friends and family, we find ourselves answering the same questions over and over. “How are you today?” “What are you doing today?” “How are you staying sane and practicing self care?” “Did you see the news today?” It can get frustrating to be asked these questions in such high frequency, and even feel disingenuous after a while.

My app, Reply All, is a response generator for these repetitive questions. It lets the user respond to the message (the nice thing to do) without having to feel obligated to think of something profound or creative to say. This reduces frustration and preserves the user’s emotional energy to talk about things they maybe rather would say to whoever they’re talking to!

App’s Audience

Reply All is really for any mobile app user during this time, but I’ll be designing it for college aged people, since that is the audience that I personally am most familiar with.

Precedent Research

There are plenty of word generator apps, Madlib apps, even apps where you can chat with an ai. But all of these are heavily game-ified, and none of them empathize with what we are all experiencing right now. This makes 

I think this is achievable for the timeframe allowed for the project, because I mainly just have to get API calls working. I also need to keep the data structures of my project organized so I can manage what user input is going where & what result it is producing.

Content needed for App

This could include text, data (from APIs or other), formulas, etc. — whatever your app requires.

I’m planning on using WordsAPI to generate the messages. It’s free and there seems to be ample documentation. Based on the words the user enters, I can get “synonyms”, “antonyms”, “similar to”, “pertains to”, and many other categories.

WordsAPI in tandem with user input will compose the content I need for Reply All.

Paper Prototype

Here is the home page of my app, where the user can select the message (or the one most similar to) they have received and need a response to.

Then they are taken to a view where they can enter in how they’re feeling, being how verbose they want to be, in a madlib style way. This will be in EditText and DropDown menu widgets primarily.

When they finish, the last view is their generated message!

Questions Moving Forward

Since I’m still getting comfortable with Kotlin, I would like some input on the scope of my app. There aren’t too many different technical components, but I also don’t want to set out to do too much.