Money Toons

Inspiration

So over the years I've become increasingly concerned about the potential cognitive decline that might be resulting from the short form content that's dominating social media. I began to notice unhealthy behaviors such as doom scrolling within myself and I wanted to do something to address that or at least improve the situation.

What it does

Our application scapes the web for stock market data and the latest news headlines in order to critically analyze the merits of different stocks. Once it's done that it will create a short 30 to 90 second horizontal video with an ai voiceover of a popular character or personality along with synced subtitles over the video.

How I built it

We began by creating a simple data aggregate function where given a certain stock ticker we could quickly pull available data such as news articles and the most recent stock data available. We then prompted ChatGPT 4o to analyze this data and form an opinion on the company and stock. Once we gained the output from ChatGPT we customized it a bit to fit one of six different personalities fromm Family Guy, Rick and Morty, Invincible, and Sponge Bob. Once we had a category we utilized the Eleven labs text to speech api with voice models trained on audio data we gathered in order to generate an audio file of said personality being imitated into saying the market analysis. After that the audio files were passed through the Whisper API offered by openai to get a timestamped transcription. Once we had a personality, a voice, and a transcription we put it in a 9:16 ratio container which would be our 'video'. The background of the media would be some repetitive video such as minecraft gameplay or family guy clips.

Challenges I ran into

I had lost about three hours of development time due to a bug within nextjs which was helping obscure an error from prisma trying to inform me that my database connection with mongodb was unstable.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm very proud of getting the ai content pipeline out of the way as quick as I did because it was the most complicated and compelling part of this project