Baak Media

Baak Media is a multilingual AI platform for culturally rooted storytelling, illustrated book creation, reading, debate, and critical thinking.

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Inspiration

Many communities have rich stories, traditions, languages, and lived experiences that are rarely represented in digital learning tools. Cultural knowledge can disappear when it is not preserved, translated, illustrated, and made accessible to younger generations.

Baak Media was created to help communities preserve cultural memory while also giving students modern tools for creativity, reading, discussion, and critical thinking.

What it does

Baak Media is a multilingual AI-powered storytelling and learning platform built around three connected experiences:

Library

The Library gives users access to illustrated, culturally rooted books. Readers can browse categories, open stories, change language, and experience books through a visual reading interface.

Storyboard

Storyboard transforms a cultural idea into a complete illustrated book. A user can provide the original story or concept, choose the culture or community, reader age, tone, and output languages, and then generate:

  • a structured narrative
  • a book title
  • a cover
  • illustrated pages
  • multilingual versions
  • a shareable digital book

AI Learning Suite

Baak also includes two AI-powered learning tools.

AI Debater helps students practice argumentation, reasoning, evidence, rebuttal, and respectful disagreement.

Dual AI Suite lets users ask one question, compare ChatGPT and Gemini side by side, explore opposing ideas, and develop stronger critical-thinking skills.

Together, these tools extend Baak Media from cultural storytelling into active learning and thoughtful dialogue.

How we built it

Baak Media was built as a responsive web application using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Netlify, serverless functions, AWS S3, and AI APIs.

OpenAI is used for:

  • story development and restructuring
  • educational dialogue
  • debate coaching
  • reasoning support
  • critical-thinking interactions
  • AI-assisted multilingual content workflows

Serverless backend functions protect API keys and route requests securely. Generated books, illustrations, text, and shared-book files are stored in AWS S3.

The platform also includes a multilingual preference system supporting English, French, Wolof, Spanish, and Italian.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was creating a smooth end-to-end generation flow while keeping API keys out of the browser.

We also had to solve:

  • long AI generation times
  • serverless timeout behavior
  • asynchronous generation status
  • AWS S3 upload structure
  • Netlify deployment and secret-scanning errors
  • multilingual book loading
  • reader navigation and narration behavior
  • responsive layouts across desktop and mobile
  • consistent routing between ChatGPT, Gemini, and dual-AI modes

Another challenge was designing the experience so that the technology supports the culture instead of overshadowing it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that Baak Media is a functioning platform rather than only a concept.

During Build Week, we completed:

  • a working multilingual cultural Storyboard generator
  • generated illustrated books with covers and page images
  • a browsable digital Library
  • a shareable book-reader workflow
  • an AI Debater for student reasoning practice
  • a Dual AI Suite for side-by-side model comparison
  • secure Netlify backend functions
  • AWS S3 storage for generated books
  • a unified Baak Media interface for all three experiences

We are especially proud that users can move from a cultural idea to a complete, illustrated, multilingual book in one connected experience.

What we learned

We learned that building a strong AI product is not only about producing text. The complete experience requires reliable generation, storage, language handling, image organization, navigation, accessibility, and thoughtful interface design.

We also learned the importance of:

  • keeping AI credentials on the server
  • building fallbacks for long-running requests
  • separating generation from status tracking
  • designing AI tools around a clear educational purpose
  • preserving user control over language, tone, culture, and audience
  • testing every part of the workflow as one complete system

What's next for Baak Media

The next phase will focus on:

  • generating consistent OpenAI narration for every book
  • storing page-by-page audio beside each book in AWS
  • improving cultural-language pronunciation
  • expanding the Library with more communities and traditions
  • adding educator and classroom tools
  • improving collaborative story creation
  • creating author and community contribution portals
  • strengthening accessibility and offline reading
  • expanding the platform for schools, libraries, cultural organizations, and families

Our long-term goal is to make Baak Media a global platform where communities can preserve their heritage, create new stories, and help future generations learn through culture.

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