Fax

Inspiration

As a part of GenZ, it is very rarely that any of us have the time or energy to fully read a news article. In fact, most reading we do has been reduced to skimming for the most important information. The same can be said for other audiences. However, it is of the utmost importance to both society and its individuals that we keep up with the news. Therefore, fax is intended to provide an accessible, at-a-glance source of news for people like us.

What it does

This web app displays world news events and provides concise summaries of each to limit the time spent catching up to world events. It additionally displays context and implications for each of these issues if the user desires to learn more. Finally, it provides links to articles discussing each of these events.

How we built it

First, we use NewsAPI to get links from across the internet to today’s most important articles from unbiased sources. These links are then funnelled to Perplexity API, which is then used to access the content of these articles, compile them into 6 or 7 distinct events, and generate concise descriptions of each event. Finally, we organize this information on our web page in an easy-to-digest, at-a-glance format.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was making sure Perplexity API always gives us responses formatted the same. Since this was a prompt to Gen AI, it was difficult to make certain it would do this, but making our automatic prompt more and more meticulous helped a lot with its consistency.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our work on the frontend. It has come a long way from how it initially looked when we first hosted our website locally. We had a minimalistic vision that was meant to not overwhelm users and rather easily call upon their focus, and we made a lot of progress towards that goal.

What we learned

We learned to be persistent. There were many times when the simplest, almost meaningless errors and bugs led to us being stuck for hours. However, sitting together again and facing the problem's absurdity after a break was an enjoyable experience and was very rewarding for us once these problems were resolved.

What's next for Fax

We faced some issues with updating the news daily. The mechanism to call and generate new News summaries every time the date changes is working in the background. However, there are some issues with connecting this to our web app, which is something we would like to solve in the very near future. We also intend to improve the front end continuously to make it even easier for users to understand at a glance. On top of this, we have some more ambitious plans. We would like to incorporate a chatbot into our website. This would allow users to get more information on any line or piece of news they don't understand by simply highlighting it, practically turning our news screen into a dynamic chat response. We also want to have an option for users to archive news and chats so they can return to news descriptions they want to see later. Finally, we would also like to add new secondary sections to our main page, like top news in sports, or entertainment, so that our main frame could hold mainly top news in geopolitical and other life-changing categories.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• newsapi
• node.js
• perplexity
• react