-
Goya the newsbot
Inspiration
News drives the world around us. Realtime knowledge of what's happening around us, in a summarised manner is key for us to make quick decisions, in almost every context.
With Goya we wanted to build a bot that was more than just taking RSS feeds from the web and presenting it as a card format.
We wanted to make sure that story-telling and newsyness is not compromised. We wanted to make sure that people had the freedom to choose what news they wanted, irrespective of the location and irrespective of interests.
And all this without installing a ton of apps just for news. Our inspiration was to provide the millennial generation with an ability to stay informed on any topic they wanted or were interested.
What it does
Goya connects to the top news sources of the world, using the event-registry API, fetches news in realtime, summarises it using NLP techniques for a conversational format, and provides it to users.
It does this for any topic in the world and for any location. It can bring news from any top news source.
How we built it
We used our own custom FB code and NLP engine. The stack is purely built on top of Nodejs and python. We connected to a wide range of news sources for the news and we used Rasa AI for NLP. We used auto summarisation techniques to create a conversational experience for the users. We used elastic search for search backend.
Challenges we ran into
Sourcing news and parsing it was the biggest challenge. We are still working on making it better. Also, trading the bot is a big challenge to handle almost any NLP question. Finally handling large chunks of incoming news data at scale in realtime was a big problem.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are the world's only ONLY newsbot that does news experience right. We do a fully conversational experience. We are also the only bot in the new domain which has the largest coverage and runs in autopilot mode, with no human intervention.
What we learned
Newsbots are hard to build and a constant work in progress. Ranging from the experience design to the news sourcing and personalized experience, there is a long list of algorithms and tweaks needed.
What's next for Newsbot
We want to make newsbot a fully localised bot for all sources of information, ranging from text, audio and video. We want to give it the ability to give highly personalized geolocation aware realtime news service for all users.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.