Roastify by Humor Genome

An AI that roasts your photos and turns them into scroll-stopping, laugh-worthy captions in seconds.

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🔥 Inspiration

We all know that friend who stares at their photo for ten minutes trying to write a funny caption, then gives up with "feeling cute." That happens to everyone. Humor is hard to write fast.

Roastify fixes that. It's an AI tool that turns any photo into a quick, funny roast caption you can share instantly.

🧠 What We Built

Roastify lets users upload an image or write a short post, and the app generates roast-style captions tailored to the content's tone and mood. Users can:

  • Pick their favorite caption
  • Tweak the tone (playful, sarcastic, absurd, wholesome)
  • Share or copy it for any social platform

⚙️ How It Works (Tech Stack)

The stack builds on components from our humor research project, Humor Genome, and is optimized for Cloud Run performance and scalability.

  • Frontend: Firebase Hosting for the dashboard, config editor, and feedback portal
  • Backend: Cloud Run for event handling, AI prompt calls, and feedback processing
  • AI Layer: Gemini (Vertex AI) for safe, witty caption generation
  • Database: Firestore for user feedback and real-time data streaming
  • Analytics: BigQuery for humor insights and taste-model training

💡 What We Learned

  • Latency tuning: Optimizing Cloud Run cold starts made a visible difference in responsiveness.
  • Prompt design matters: Small wording shifts in humor prompts changed tone and engagement drastically.
  • Feedback loops: Emoji reactions provided real-time data on humor preferences — key for personalization models.
  • Serverless scaling: Cloud Run's autoscaling kept costs near zero while handling sudden traffic spikes.

🎭 Challenges We Faced

  • Balancing roast sharpness vs. user comfort — humor can cross lines easily, so we added safety filters for tone control.
  • Managing AI response time on a limited budget — optimized batching and caching to stay snappy.
  • Creating human-feeling captions — required iterating through dozens of comedic styles to avoid templated tone.

🚀 What's Next

Roastify is the first step toward a personalized humor engine — learning what each user finds funny and adapting in real time. Next, we plan to:

  • Launch a public Discord integration so users can roast directly in their servers
  • Expand caption themes (dating, pets, fitness, travel)
  • Use Cloud Run + BigQuery to analyze humor trends and refine taste models at scale

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