Thought Connect 🧠⚡

Thought Connect is a collaborative, AI-first mobile application designed to help teams capture, organize, and search for information seamlessly. It transforms unstructured data, like images and notes, into a structured, searchable knowledge base.

Quick Start (TL;DR)

git clone https://github.com/dbmnio/thought-connect-2
cd thought-connect-2
npm install -g expo-cli
npx expo install
npx expo start

For more details, see Getting Started below

Overview

In today's fast-paced environments, valuable information is often scattered across different formats and platforms. A photo of a whiteboard from a brainstorm, a quick note, or a question asked in passing can all contain critical knowledge. Thought Connect provides a central hub for this information, using AI to make it effortlessly discoverable.

Users can create "Thoughts," which can be simple text notes or images. The app uses OpenAI's GPT-4o Vision model to automatically analyze images and generate rich, detailed descriptions. These descriptions are then converted into vector embeddings and stored in a Supabase Postgres database with the pgvector extension, enabling powerful semantic search capabilities.

Features

• Team-Based Collaboration: Organize work and knowledge within dedicated teams.
• Capture Thoughts: Create thoughts from text or by uploading images directly from the camera or gallery.
• AI-Powered Image Analysis: Images are automatically described and tagged by an AI vision model.
• Semantic Search: Find relevant information by searching for concepts and ideas, not just keywords. The app understands the meaning behind your query.
• Knowledge Base: A dedicated view to search and explore the collective knowledge of your teams.
• Secure and Scalable: Built on Supabase, ensuring row-level security so users only see data from teams they belong to.

Architecture

Thought Connect is built on a modern, scalable stack designed for AI-powered applications.

Frontend

• React Native & Expo: For building a cross-platform mobile application for iOS, Android, and Web from a single codebase.
• Expo Router: Implements file-based routing, creating a clean and maintainable navigation structure.
• Zustand: For lightweight, simple state management.

Backend

• Supabase: The all-in-one backend-as-a-service platform providing:
  • PostgreSQL Database: The primary data store, supercharged with the pgvector extension for storing and querying vector embeddings.
  • Auth: Manages user authentication and authorization securely. Row-Level Security (RLS) is extensively used to enforce data access policies.
  • Storage: For securely storing user-uploaded images.
  • Edge Functions: Serverless functions written in Deno (TypeScript) that handle business logic requiring secure environment variables or intensive computation.
    • generate-thought-embedding: Triggered when a new thought with an image is created. It downloads the image, uses OpenAI GPT-4o to generate a description, creates a vector embedding from that description, and updates the database.
    • search-thoughts: Takes a user's search query, embeds it using OpenAI, and queries the database to find the most similar thoughts using cosine similarity.

AI & Machine Learning

• OpenAI:
  • GPT-4o: Used for its state-of-the-art vision capabilities to analyze images.
  • text-embedding-3-small: A powerful and efficient model used to convert text (both AI-generated descriptions and user queries) into vector embeddings.

Getting Started

Follow these instructions to set up and run the project locally.

Prerequisites

• Node.js (LTS version)
• npm or your preferred package manager
• Expo CLI: npm install -g expo-cli
• Supabase CLI: npm install -g supabase

1. Clone the Repository

git clone <repository-url>
cd thought-connect-2

2. Install Dependencies

Install the required npm packages.

npx expo install

3. Set up Supabase

NOTE: There is no need to perform this step if you are using the production database. Configure .env appropriately to do so. See .env.example for a template of used variables.

1. Log in to Supabase:

   supabase login

2. Link your local project to your Supabase project: (Replace [PROJECT_ID] with your actual Supabase project ID from your project's dashboard URL)

   supabase link --project-ref [PROJECT_ID]

3. Create an Environment File: Create a new file app.d.ts in the root of the project and add your Supabase and OpenAI credentials.

   // app.d.ts
   declare namespace NodeJS {
     interface ProcessEnv {
       EXPO_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL: string;
       EXPO_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY: string;
       OPENAI_API_KEY: string;
     }
   }

   You will need to create a .env file in the root and add the values there. Do not commit this file to version control.

4. Push Database Migrations: Apply all the database migrations to set up your schema, tables, and functions.

   supabase db push

Note: If you have issues, you may need to run supabase db reset which will wipe the remote database before pushing.

4. Run the Application

Start the Expo development server.

npx expo start

This will open the Expo developer tools in your browser. You can then run the app on a simulator (iOS/Android) or on a physical device using the Expo Go app.

Project Structure

The codebase is organized to be modular, scalable, and easy for AI tools and developers to understand.

thought-connect-2/
├── app/                # Expo Router file-based routes
│   ├── (app)/          # Authenticated user screens
│   └── (auth)/         # Sign-in/Sign-up flow
├── assets/             # Static assets (images, fonts)
├── components/         # Reusable React components
│   ├── knowledge-base/ # Components for the search/chat UI
│   ├── team/
│   └── thoughts/
├── hooks/              # Custom React hooks
├── lib/                # Core logic, Supabase client, stores
├── supabase/           # Supabase project configuration
│   ├── functions/      # Edge Functions source code
│   └── migrations/     # Database schema migrations
└── package.json        # Project dependencies and scripts

This comprehensive structure ensures that the application is easy to navigate, maintain, and scale.

Planned Features

• Support landscape mode in photo editor