Show HN: Mortgage Chat – A bot that answers your awkward home buying questions

Mortgage Chat is a GPT-3.5-powered chatbot that answers your mortgage lending and home buying questions you were too afraid to ask.

Working with mortgage loan officers can be challenging, off-putting, and frustrating.

My goals for this project were:

- Familiarizing myself with in-context learning using GPT3

- Exploring AI's potential in complex domains (non-technology) domains like mortgage lending

- Creating a user-friendly, non-judgmental, and non-commercially motivated tool for 24x7 guidance on anything mortgage-related

How I built it:

- I built the bot using Langchain and used their sample chatbot as a base, although did significant prompt and other tweakings, including building the "next questions to ask" functionality.

- I crawled the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's website for mortgage content. Relevant content is fed to the bot from a FAISS index (Langchain makes this super easy). I used the CFPB as it struck me as the most neutral and factual of various online content sources.

- I also provide the bot with up-to-date mortgage rate data from the Federal Reserve's FRED service.

The bot could definitely be improved:

- I tried letting GPT3 ask the user questions about their mortgage situation in order to be more helpful but found it overly aggressive and off-putting. I think this is definitely feasible, but requires more thought.

- Websockets can be a pain, and I'd probably want to use server-side events in production to stream results to the bot client.

h/t to:

- Langchain and community.

- The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.