Drift

We create

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Drift

Thoughtful answers you can just listen to.

Publicly hosted on Vercel

Inspiration

You know that feeling when you ask a big question like “Is wine good for you?” and suddenly you’re lost in a maze of tabs, clickbait headlines, and conflicting studies. It’s exhausting. We wanted to create a calm, focused way to get a reliable answer—without the noise.

What it does

Drift turns your question into a short, podcast-style audio response. Just type in what you’re curious about, pick how deep you want to go, and press play.

Features

  • Personalized audio answers tailored to your question
  • Multiple depths: “Curious Kid,” “Informed Adult,” or “Academic”
  • High-quality research from Perplexity
  • Warm, engaging narration powered by OpenAI
  • Play anywhere: cooking, commuting, or just zoning out

How we built it

We combined modern web tech with powerful AI services:

Frontend

  • Next.js 15 – React framework for the web app
  • TypeScript – Type safety everywhere
  • Tailwind CSS – Warm, custom styles
  • shadcn/ui – Radix-based component library
  • Zustand – Lightweight state management
  • React Hook Form with Zod – Forms and validation

Backend

  • FastAPI – Python service for question handling
  • OpenAI – Script generation & text-to-speech
  • Perplexity AI – Research gathering and source quality

Infrastructure

  • Vercel – Frontend hosting
  • Render – Backend deployment
  • GitHub Actions – CI/CD pipeline
  • Supabase – Database and file storage

Perplexity Integration

  1. Research Gathering: On each query, we call Perplexity’s API to fetch up-to-date info from academic papers, news articles, and expert blogs.
  2. Source Quality: We filter for top-tier sources and expose them in the player.
  3. User Visibility: Every audio answer shows its full list of citations—so you can verify or deep-dive.
  4. Contextual Understanding: Perplexity helps parse nuance, so OpenAI scripts hit the right tone.
  5. Real-time Updates: Live API calls mean answers stay fresh, even as new studies drop.

Challenges we ran into

  • Finding the right voice: Finding the right voice that suits our application
  • Deploying the app: Deploying and managing the communication between frontend, backend and the databasse

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

  • 🚀 Seamless, end-to-end audio answers
  • 🔎 Full transparency—users can see the sources of the generated content

What we learned

  • Good audio answers need more than facts—they need storytelling.
  • Exposing research sources builds trust and invites exploration.
  • Thoughtful defaults (like “Informed Adult” depth) reduce friction.

What’s next for Drift

  • Mobile app would be cool for on-the-go listening
  • Multi-language support and customizable voices
  • Personalized playlists based on your interests and listening history

Stay tuned :)

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