Inspiration
Our entire project was inspired by Samsung’s Now Brief overview, which shows the user the weather, their schedule, and headlines. We wanted to make a web app that functioned similarly, but was more widely accessible and showed more information than Now Brief. We thought about our own schedules, and decided to add a motivational quote to start the day with, as well as a commute estimator. We also had Morning Report summarize the weather and news headlines for ease of reading.
What it does
Morning Report uses several APIs to fetch information on the weather, traffic on your commute, stocks, the news, and an inspirational quote. The news card consists of an AI summary of the top New York Times articles and the weather card has an AI summarized line that describes the entire days' weather. Users can input a start and end location, as well as a stock symbol in the settings page to customize the information shown.
How we built it
Morning Report is a web app that was made entirely in Visual Studio Code with HTML 5, CSS, and Node JS. The app gets its data through five different APIs in order to display up-to-date and accurate information to its users.
Challenges we ran into
The APIs were difficult to learn at first, but once we wrote functions to get clean data from one, it wasn’t difficult to apply the same logic to the others. Also, our API for the stocks rate limited us, so we had to find a new API and adapt our code mid-project. The GUI took a lot of time to make, and we had difficulty finding the proper balance of a program that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The main accomplishment we are proud of is getting the project done in the limited amount of time we had. We needed to learn our selected APIs and clean the data up in order to display it cleanly on the webpage. Figuring out how to embed a map for the commute tracker and the graph of the stocks was difficult, but it felt very rewarding once we got something that looked good.
What we learned
One of our team members had to learn html and javascript as he went along, in order to help program the web app. We both also had to learn the proper syntaxes for each of the five APIs we used.
What's next for MorningReport
MorningReport would benefit greatly from an AI-powered text-to-speech algorithm. The purpose of the product is to help people speed along their mornings by consolidating information into one location. It would be able to more efficiently complete this task if users could listen to their Morning Report while getting ready for their day, instead of still needing to remove time from their mornings to read the Report.
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