MENN -AI generated news from friends and family

MENN is AI first Social Media. Friends share their videos; Gemini collates them, writes a script and presents a nightly news report. Think 'Daily Dose of Internet' starring your friends and family.

Comment

Inspiration

Social media is great but it has a scale problem. At scale there are a few winners but a lot of societal problems. I went back to basics. What if social media was more like a group chat? Users post videos and these are collated by Gemini into a fun daily news report. It's a bit like 'daily dose of internet' but with your friends and a robot host.

See a typical news report generated by the app Link to Video

What it does

Users from a friend group post short videos. The app collates them and then makes a daily news report which it shares with the group. Gemini writes the script, captions and chooses the graphics (emojis at the moment but later generative art).

Rather than wait for comments Gemini interviews users about their friends videos.

Users can reply by text (like a chatbot) or via video message.

How I built it

I used Expo and firebase. Firebase has an excellent Gemini extension that made it quite easy to link with the API.

Challenges we ran into

Technical challenges

I originally built it in react but ran into too many problems uploading media from mobile devices so rebuilt it in expo. A few thing broke at the last minute so I had to remove them.

Scale

The problem with small scale is lack of content. That's where Gemini helps. The app uses gemini to interview friends about the videos posted.

Chicken and egg

Social apps require users. To get users you need users. I solved this by asking friends and family to help. To see what a report looks like go to about and check out the demo. I was surprised how well it came out

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm really happy with the demo report it looks and feels great

What we learned

The API was a lot easier to use than expected. I learned a lot about prompting Gemini

What's next for MENN -AI generated news from friends and family

I would like to keep developing it. It's quite rough at the moment but people love the core idea when they see the demo news report. I need to refine the onboarding and user sign up. I think it has potential.

Share this project:

Updates