Auric Vista
A mobile-first travel and social discovery app with a quiet-luxury look: places, stays and bookings in one flow.
What it is
Auric Vista is a mobile-first travel and social discovery app with a quiet-luxury look. Places, stays and bookings sit in one flow, so planning a trip does not mean jumping between apps.
The AuricVista assistant
I also built the brand’s AI assistant, which answers questions about the company, its student stays and its travel experiences. Greetings and off-topic questions get an instant reply with no AI call; real questions go to Gemini, grounded in AuricVista’s own content, with a strict time limit; and if the AI is slow or down, a built-in knowledge engine answers instead. Injection and jailbreak attempts are blocked before they reach the model, and API keys never leave the server.
Speed and cost
Greetings and off-topic questions are answered instantly without any AI call, which saves both time and API usage. Real questions get 3.5 seconds from Gemini before the built-in knowledge engine answers instead. On Render’s free tier the server sleeps after 15 minutes and takes 50 to 70 seconds to wake, so the assistant has a health endpoint with a keep-alive ping, and Vercel is the recommended host because it avoids that spin-down.