NewsBreaker

Here is a screenshot of the home page!
Here is a screenshot of the "hamburger" menu!
Here is a screenshot of the article feed page!
Here is a screenshot of the sign in page!
Here is a screenshot of the account information page that allows users to input their demographic information!

Inspiration

As young adults navigating our way into the post-grad world, we have found that there is a disconnect between the news sources that our parents read and information that is critical to our lives. As busy students, we wanted to bridge this knowledge gap and stay up to date on current events in small digestible portions of text. We decided to create a news finding tool that brings us only the information that is relevant to us based on interests and demographic information.

What it does

NewsBreak takes basic demographic and interest information such as age, gender, and region and searches for the most relevant and up to date articles that may be beneficial to the user. We utilized Gemini API in order to generate personalized results for each user. We also made an account feature that allows users to return outputs specified to them whenever and wherever they wish - that's right, we also got the website to run on mobile devices too!

How we built it

We built the user interface for NewsBreak using Wix Studio and the backend using python & incorporated key materials such as the Gemini API to generate the news output.

Challenges we ran into

One particular challenge that we had encountered in this hackathon is incorporating the API into Wix Studio, as none of us have encountered a task like this in our academic or professional lives, we became frustrated with the difficulty of the task. Though, it was a fun challenge, this was by far the hardest steppingstone in this Hackathon journey.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of our biggest accomplishments is developing a working API that provided us with the information that we needed in order to generate an output. Some of us have done hackathons in the past and were unable to complete any substantial working code, so being able to take one big step towards a productive project was definitely a satisfying goal to reach. Additionally, developing a working API is not an easy task, we struggled with this throughout the weekend, so it was especially satisfying to see our hard work turn into a tangible outcome.

What we learned

Throughout the course of this project, we have learned both the hard skills of website design, prompt engineering, python code, Wix Studio, and the ins and outs of Gemini API; and the soft skills of teamwork and working under pressure with short deadlines.

What's next for NewsBreaker

Something that we wanted to include in NewsBreak but we could not be due to the time constraints include a feature that allows users to save articles in a favorite feature and like/dislike articles to provide a more user-centric experience.