Improve Improv

Inspiration

One of our favourite parts of our community is our local improv team. Their monthly performances are always a highlight for our months. When we thought about giving back, we immediately thought about giving back to them. We know that a lot of improv ability comes from practice so we wanted to provide them with a practice resource to get even better. That’s where the idea of using AI to generate prompts of improv exercises came to be.

What it does

Our site generates and displays 8 prompts using OpenAI. By filling out an optional section providing phone number(s) and our usage of Twilio, users can text prompts to themselves and the members of their teams to practice together. This way, everyone can easily have the prompt and it’s on hand while actors can be on the move.

How we built it

To build the site we had to use and learn various technologies. For hosting, we have set up serverless micros on deta.sh as our app is relatively light. The same provider also provides a No-SQL database that we used to store phone numbers and prompts as well as the user ID. An important part of our app is using Twilio that new members of our team learned to use to send the prompts out via text. For the frontend, we used Wix, bootstrap as well as some javascript.

Tech Stack

Client: Javascript, Bootstrap, HTML 5, Server: Python, Flask, Deta.sh, OpenAI,

Run your own instance

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge that we ran into was that OpenAI took 13 seconds to respond and our serverlist functions had a timeout of 10 seconds. Through exploring possible providers, we were able to find one who we persuaded into increasing the timeout limit for this one project because they believed in our vision.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of coming up with our domain.com name because we often find that to be something that’s time consuming. Also, we’re proud of our usage of OpenAI in combination with the other tools to create a versatile site with infinite possibilities for improv prompts.

What we learned

One member of our team learned to use Twilio which was a positive experience and they’re now excited to use Twilio in future endeavors. Also, we learned how to use Velo by Wix which was a new tool for our entire group. We found it to be much stronger of a platform than the competitors that we have experience in. In the future, we plan on using Velo by Wix as one of our go-to platforms.

What's next for Improve Improv

Our next step would be major user testing. At the moment, we have been somewhat conservative with our testing due to OpenAI costing money each time it runs, however, with further time and financial support, we would do additional testing.