Skim-it

News media app designed to overcome the barriers of short-attention span in social media use through promotion of "social media like" news posts using LLM integrated summary and title generation.

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Inspiration

In an online landscape where users are constantly bombarded by information, it can be difficult to attract attention to walls of long form, nonfiction prose like that of reputable news articles. Our team wanted to improve accessibility to and awareness of current events by making the news appeal to a wider audience.

What it does

Our web application uses a News API and parses the article contents using Gemini to generate a more captivating title and create a short TLDR. This way allows learning about what's happening in the world to be done through the means of modern social media, which has largely been dominated by short-form content. We implemented a search bar to query any posts the user wishes to view, as well as a like and dislike feature that allows users to see the general feedback on that post.

How we built it

UI/UX

  • Figma, Canva

Frontend

  • Javascript: React, NodeJS, Axios

Backend

  • Python: NewsAPI, Gemini, Firebase, Algolia, FastAPI Alt text

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of bugs both in frontend and backend, especially in accessing the database as well as sizing the modal in the webpage. This was also our first time integrating both frontend and backend into a project so there were a lot of challenges there.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to create a viable product given only 36 hours to work on this, especially since we did this competition in-person and sacrificed our sleep. It was also our first time using backend and UI/UX elements in a project, so we're proud that we were able to use them.

What we learned

We learned how to use and integrate multiple elements of software engineering and their respective libraries to create a full-fleshed out web application.

What's next for Skim-it

After this hackathon, we hope to expand on the functionality of our project to include user systems and more media interaction. Since Gemini and LLM are very flexible tools, we also hope to create user customization of their news post presentations.

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