serena : a Bible verse recommendation app.

Say anything on your mind and Serena finds a relevant Bible verse and podcast. Built with React Native and a Node.js backend.

The app uses Word2Vec embeddings to convert what you say into a vector, then runs cosine similarity against 5000+ distinct topics to find the best match. It also learns from past searches to improve recommendations over time.

Stack

• Frontend (React Native) — cross-platform iOS/Android from a single codebase, with speech-to-text input
• Backend (Node.js/Express) — serves the similarity search API and handles recommendation logic
• NLP — Word2Vec model pre-trained on religious texts via Gensim, with custom tokenisation for biblical names and phrases
• Results are cached for common queries to keep responses fast