CommuniTales

Collaborative storytelling experience

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Inspiration

Writing a novel is a daunting task. We wanted to give both prospective and experienced authors a tool for writing their narrative. We also wanted to give authors a new experience by asking them to continue a story they did not write.

What it does

CommuniTales is a crowd-sourced story in which users can view, create, and extend stories. Leveraging OpenAI we are able to help create the foundation for beginner to experienced writers, in whatever adventure they would like to create.

How we built it

The skeleton of the code was made using React, which handled a lot of the logic and user interface. Styling was accomplished with bootstrap. The Database was made with PostgreSQL, and communicated with the website via a REST API made with Express. Axios was used to make the API requests, both to our own, and to the OpenAI API for text completion. Finally, everything was secured using Auth0.

Challenges we ran into

Our team wanted to use the CockroachDB but after 3 hours of troubleshooting and eventual help with from a mentor from SEL, we found out that the ports used by CockroachDB's cloud service are blocked by both WSU Wi-Fi and some mobile hotspots. We eventually decided to pivot into using PostgreSQL which we found to meet all of our needs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Integration of multiple technologies such as AI and databases.

What we learned

None of us were experienced with every technology used. Additionally, some technologies such as OpenAI's API was new to all of us. We pushed ourselves to learn new skills so we could make an excellent end product.

What's next for CommuniTales

We already have some plans for using AI image generation to create additional pictures of user content. We also made our system very easy to scale to larger stories, or even multiple different ones, for instance a private story you can generate with just your friends. There is a lot of potential to expand the idea given enough time, and we feel confident we can build upon what we currently have.

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