Connversational Reddit

Turning Trending Reddit into Conversational Episodes.

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Inspiration

This app is to solve a problem for me. It just so happens that the more I explored, the more I realised that the app has benefits to the visually impaired, the legally blind, dyslexics (like me) and those they have their eyes occupied. In my work, I travel a lot by road and often want to listen to interesting things. Often these are on websites that apps like Eleven Labs Reader can voice, but then there is Reddit. Reddit is not able to be voiced by any app that I can find. I even asked a battery of AI GPTs to find one to prevent me from developing one. None existed except an unsupported iOS app with minimal activity. I actually had this idea a few years ago to create a Reddit news service. I would manually voice the episodes and produce as a podcast. It was labour-intensive, not scalable, but had a following. For my use in travelling, it was pointless as I already knew the content. Roll around Conversational Reddit - or conred.

What it does

This is a free app that reads a specific subreddit conversationally using multiple AI voices.

How I built it

No team, just me. I prompted Bolt with the idea of what I wanted it to look like and the inspiration. Bolt created a web app, and I expanded on it. I restarted afresh more than 9 times during June. Each time it became complex, Bolt's integration with SupaBase and Stripe failed me,

Challenges we ran into

After vibe coding every day between work and sleep, I accidentally deleted every project in my Bolt environment when I thought I was just clearing the cache. Fortunately, I had some synced to Github, but the API interfaces just killed me. The bolt interface then started to hallucinate and tell me it fixed or changed things when it didn't. I restarted the same project 9 times. I only know this because I have nine versions on Netlify. API integration with Supabase took two weeks. Stripe took another two weeks and in the end, I just gave up on integrating Stripe, so now it is a free service. I purchased more tokens mid month, then another, then another. Even with the free tokens on the weekend, I just burned through them trying to get the API between SupaBase and Google TTS to work. I started with ElevenLabs and burned those tokens in a week. I found that the bolt chat AI was helpful until the project became complex. Then it just could not cope. I found myself switching between various LLMs and purchasing a pro membership with Google.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

When the web app did exactly what I wanted. I cried, and I am a 56-year-old man. That was mid-June, but I haven't been able to replicate that since.

What we learned

Don't believe anything AI tells you. You need to check that it did what is says it did. API integration is great if it works the first time. Soul-destroying if it does. Prompt engineering is the key. Bouncing between bolt and any other LLM to check, review, design, enhance and create the appropriate prompt was key to making things work. My workflow became; I have an idea (inputed into Gemini) - please create a prompt for Bolt.new; take that prompt, put it in discussion mode with Bolt; take bolt's implementation plan and put that into Gemini and ask if we are good to go; if we are click on implement.

What's next for ConRed io

Now that the pressure is off. I will try and integrate a payment system. The token cost for generating conversational Reddit posts is high, and I can't afford it. I aim to make this self-funding and have a well-researched marketing plan.

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