InformAI

Have you ever felt like you need to be more informed about what's going on in the world? InformAI keeps you up to date on what's happening in 5 minutes or less!

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Inspiration

Our inspiration was a mutual feeling of not being as informed about the world as we thought we should be. We wondered what stopped us from sitting down and reading the news like our parents did. In an ever-changing and fast-paced world, we realized that our attention spans were simply not as good as older generations. Therefore, we set out to build an app to help compile the most important news for each day in short-form content like the TikTok and Instagram reels that are extremely popular nowadays.

What it does

Effectively, we combine TikTok and modern news channels to create short-form news articles that can be read in under 2 minutes. These news articles are up to date from the day surrounding current world news and politics. Our aim was to help connect the world better by keeping everyone (even people with short attention spans!) informed about what's happening in our world.

How we built it

Each day, we scrape thousands of news channels using the Perigon API and summarize them using OpenAI. Then we push them to our web server after storing them in a MySQL database. We plan on making this an IOS app after HackSC, but since our members knew better how to make Web Applications, we demoed our product as a web app.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the biggest challenges we faced surrounded data storage and OpenAI. Storing the data given by the Perrigon 360 API was difficult as it was completely new to our backend team. Along with that, we had to make sure to parse the correct news articles as Perrigon accesses several thousands of news articles at a time. Along with that, we used OpenAI to summarize the articles, but asking the correct questions to the AI took lots of testing to make sure our articles were concise, but also readable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our backend team was relatively new to full-stack development, so building a project like this in such a short time took an incredible amount of teamwork and learning. Along with that, our front-end engineer initially tried to learn React but ended up using HTML, CSS, and Javascript to develop. He was also quite new to developing on the front end, so we’re incredibly proud of the work he did. Lastly, we didn’t have a fourth member, so everyone had to work around the clock and understand the full-stack development process to make this program a reality.

What we learned

HTML, CSS, PerigonAPI, OpenAI API, Teamwork skills!

What's next for InformAI

Since we were very limited on time, we made InformAI into a web application, but we really envisioned it as an IOS and Android App. Going forward, we plan to learn React Native to turn our web app into an app that can be used on our mobile devices to stay informed about the world easily and to mimic other short-form content apps like TikTok and Instagram Reels.

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