peek.ai

Instantly create a video portfolio right from your LinkedIn, that is professional and engaging at the same time without needing to set up a separate website.

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Inspiration

The idea for peek.ai came from the need to eliminate the hassle of maintaining a portfolio website. Traditional portfolios can be time-consuming to update and often fail to capture attention. We developed a tool that replaces the need for a website by turning your professional profile into a dynamic video, making it easier and more engaging to showcase your skills and experience.

What it does

peek.ai is a web platform with a companion Chrome extension that transforms your LinkedIn profile into an engaging video summary. It uses supporting AI features to extract key details from your profile and generates a concise, visually appealing video that highlights your skills, experience, and accomplishments. The generated videos come with shareable links, making it easy to distribute across various platforms.

The feature of highlight apart from the video is that you get a preview of your generated summary as a dynamic banner image when the shareable link is sent over platforms like WhatsApp so the receiver gets to see this digest of information even before clicking the link. This way, your professional story comes to life right in the conversation.

How we built it

We built peek.ai using Convex services to power our platform’s core functionalities. Convex Auth in conjunction with Clerk ensures secure user authentication, Convex File Storage stores all of our media assets, and Convex Databases stores relevant data which also comes with real-time capabilities. We used Convex Full Text Search specifically to allow users to search for profiles within our platform easily. Our Chrome extension integrates seamlessly to analyze LinkedIn profiles, applying custom algorithms to summarize key details. While Convex technologies formed the backbone of our platform, we also incorporated Google’s Gemini AI and Canva APIs to enhance video generation and social preview creation, ensuring that the content is visually engaging. Our primary focus was on making the extension and web dashboards user-friendly, enabling effortless creation of compelling video stories from LinkedIn profiles.

Challenges we ran into

  • One of the biggest challenges was ensuring the AI accurately identifies and summarizes key profile details.
  • Chrome extension scripts work differently in various contexts (background_script, content_scripts, popup, etc.), requiring planned and effective message passing among them.
  • Our key feature of generating the graphics for the Social Previews and Stories needed an elegant approach to accommodate all kinds of LinkedIn profile information due to which we resorted to using Canva. However, we are building a solution to remove this dependency and make our service open to all users.
  • Tackled the lazy loading constraint of LinkedIn to retrieve all necessary data.
  • We built guardrails and schema checks to ensure that only the most reliable and accurate data generated using AI with LLMs is saved to the database.
  • We also had to implement queueing for AI job requests to prevent rate limits and prevent holding the user's server request.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The added ability that Convex gave us through its Database and Full Text Search offerings, enabled us to implement features like the Peek search bar, which is something we feel accomplished about, that otherwise would have taken significant planning and implementation.

The positive feedback from our beta testers, who found the tool easy to use and effective in enhancing their professional presence, is a major accomplishment. Most of all, we are happy to convey that we were able to build the entire product in under 2 weeks while retaining key aspects to enable an appealing and seamless user experience.

What we learned

The development of peek.ai has been a sprint of various technical and non-technical learnings. On the technical front, we got to experience and plan out how the behind-the-scenes operations must be automated to handle user workloads with Google Gemini APIs to make AI inferences and how leveraging Convex can instantly bring in real-time capabilities, that go hand-in-hand with our backend and frontend for our application's users. On the other hand, we got the experience of interacting with some test users and their LinkedIn profiles to ensure that our systems are robust enough to handle a variety of profiles where we also could spot and handle certain edge cases.

What's next for peek.ai

Looking ahead, we plan to enhance peek.ai by introducing more customization options for users, such as different video styles and templates. We are also exploring the integration of additional features like voice-overs and interactive elements in the video summaries. In addition, peek.ai will have the following in the coming times:

  • Remove the dependency on Canva for graphics generation.
  • Custom shortened peek URLs
  • Rich analytics of user interactions
  • Ability to add custom links (like social handles, services, etc.) to the users' peek page
  • Migration to other LinkedIn APIs to reduce synchronization times.

Our goal is to continuously improve peek.ai to make it an indispensable tool for professionals seeking to make a memorable impact.

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