Inspiration
Doom Scrolling on Tik-Tok and other Social Media.
What it does
You start with a news article which is generated on demand based on your scroll activity. If you are interested in what you are reading and scrolling slowly it'll go more in depth. But if you're just skimming through the article it'll try to come up with other topics or a completely different article to catch you're interest again.
How we built it
The Frontend requests new Content Blocks every time it runs out of text to display. In addition it also sends telemetry data of your scroll behavior so that the backend can decide what type of content block to send back depending on your interest level (in-depth, in-context and out-of-context). The Frontend uses JavaScript and the Backend Spring Boot. The content generation itself was achieved with OpenAI's chat completion prompted with actual news for background information.
Challenges we ran into
As it was our first ever hackathon we vastly over-scoped the project and thus certainly ran out of time. The trickiest technical part however certainly was the automatic streaming of new content blocks while taking into account the user behavior and asynchronous block generation.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Even if it is not polished the prototype we built is functional and we had our moments in which the site did exactly what we as the user expected. This showed us that the idea actually has some potential.
All in all the fact that we completed this rather complex project in such little time is a great feeling
What we learned
As it was our first hackathon we learned a lot about the soft skills required to pull such a project off and work effectively as a team. We're certainly looking forward to the next time with a bigger team.
What's next for Engaging News
The app works but it is not as responsive as we'd like. It certainly doesn't scale well at this point in time. However with partial content pre-generation and other optimizations there is a lot of room for improvement
Built With
- html/css
- java
- javascript
- openai
- python
- springboot
- swaggercodegen
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