[Condensate]

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  Our currently functioning prototype with its main use summary.

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  An example article processed through the website.

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  Desired homepage with finalized results.

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  Basic logo.

Inspiration

Oftentimes articles are written exceedingly verbose for no reason to fill word length requirements and wastes time when you’re trying to extract information from the news. For students like us, this is one of the worst things about finishing a project, work or research. Condensate is a simple solution to getting the information that you want without the tiring filler details sites often bombard you with.

What it does

Condensate works by having the user input the article into a textbox to condense it into a simple summary. The text is sent and summarised using Symbl.ai and then outputted back to the user.

How we built it

We built the website using html5, css and javascript. The main API used was Symbl.ai which would take text and output a summary from the web scraped paragraphs.

Challenges we ran into

During the initial brainstorm, net scraping through a user input url would have gotten us a text file instead of user inputting the text straight away. And creating a net scraping fully on front end without a server to host packages such as npm proved to be a very big challenge. We ended up being unable to make it work, but that would still be the biggest challenge we faced in this Hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A good accomplishment that was achieved in the project was learning how to integrate APIs into our javascript and code. We started with basic web development skills and finished with learning how to host on github and utilising APIs.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate and use symbl.ai and other APIs in the project. We learned and reviewed how to use javascript, html, css for designing a website. We learned figma, as well as basic User Interface/User Experience design, and human centered design principles.

What's next for Condensate?

The plans for improving Condensate are simple but effective. We want to finish out net scraping feature we couldn't manage to finish in time, as well as being able to parse more than just articles and summarize videos or conversations using symbl.ai’s effective API. Youtube videos and other media also have increasingly long periods for unnecessary information. Another step towards improving Condensate would be to add on Themes and Topics that the software can pick up on as a focus to showcase to the User to highlight its importance in the article.

Built With

• css
• css3
• html
• html5
• javascript
• symbl.ai