Movie Groovy: Building a Mood-Based Recommender with Python and Empathy

Abstract

Ever spent 40 minutes choosing a movie, only to rewatch something you didn’t even love? In this talk, I’ll share how I built Movie Groovy, a Python-based app that recommends movies based on how you feel. I’ll walk through how I used tools like FastAPI, Qdrant, Gemini (and some more) to create emotionally-aware suggestions, combining filtering logic, a lightweight Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach, and an agentic flow that guides users step-by-step through their choices, for a more personalized experience. More than the stack, we’ll explore why empathy matters in AI, how user feedback shaped the design, and how you can build meaningful tools using open-source solutions, even as a solo dev. If you’re into Python, curious about AI beyond the hype, or just want to build things that feel more human, this talk is for you.

Speakers