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Abhimanyu Mathur
Abhimanyu Mathur

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Ayuda: Your Time, for the Greater Good!

#hf26challenge #ai #beginners #productivity

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass

What I Built

Transform your screentime from doomscrolling, and explore greater good tasks near you. I bring you, Ayuda: voice-first, location-aware volunteering app.
You say what you can offer ("two hours on Sunday morning, I can teach English to kids, no money"), and Ayuda finds verified organisations nearby that need exactly that. Then it gets out of your way so you can go and help.

Demo

Ayuda Video Demo.mov - Google Drive

favicon drive.google.com

Code

GitHub logo supermanyu90 / ayuda

Voice-first, location-aware volunteering: open-weight Gemma 3 4B + ElevenLabs + PostGIS

Ayuda

Give your time. Find where it matters.

Ayuda is a voice-first, location-aware volunteering app. You say what you can offer ("two hours on Sunday morning, I can teach English to kids, no money"), and Ayuda finds verified organisations nearby that need exactly that. Then it gets out of your way so you can go and help.

Built for the DEV Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge, Week 1: Touch Grass: open-weight AI that gets people off the screen and into the world.

Most AI products optimise for more screen time. Ayuda optimises for the opposite: the shortest safe path from one sentence to real-world action Success metric: real-world volunteering minutes per minute spent in Ayuda. The app measures it: visible-tab time is counted on-device from the start of a plan to the commitment, and the exit screen tells you, e.g. "You spent 1 min 52 s on your screen to…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

Ayuda uses Gemma 3 4B, Google's open AI model, which runs on a local computer through Ollama. It helps Ayuda understand and respond to users in three main ways:

  • Understands what you say: No surprises here, pretty vanilla with AI these days.
  • Helps NGOs create listings It prepares draft listings based on information provided by an NGO. An administrator reviews and approves each listing before it becomes visible to users.
  • Creates short voice responses: It writes a simple, two-sentence summary that Ayuda can read aloud to the user.

To keep responses consistent and reliable, Ayuda uses additional checks to ensure the AI follows a predefined format and that its responses meet strict validation rules.

Note that, Ayuda does not let AI decide which organisations are real or trustworthy. The AI only helps understand what users say. Information about organisations, their locations and their verification status comes from a structured database. Google Reviews can be added here.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open weights were what made Ayuda work. Four things it could do that a closed API wouldn't have allowed:

  1. The request stays on your machine. The one exception is ElevenLabs voice, and typing or tapping keeps the whole AI path local.

  2. I could find the failures, fix them, and prove the fix.

  3. Communities can adapt it themselves. With a closed API, they could only ask the vendor for that feature.

  4. A small NGO can afford it. A 4B model runs on a laptop. Volunteering tools mostly serve organisations with no budget, and they shouldn't depend on per-toke on an API key that could be revoked.

Prize Categories

(a) Gemma
(b) ElevenLabs

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