Inspiration
When you're trying to find the right product on Amazon, sometimes the rating doesn't tell the whole story, or you just don't want to spend the time to look through reviews to find out the benefits and drawbacks of each product. For people with a visual impairment, the problem is worse: the Amazon user interface can be inaccessible, making it difficult for them to find the product that they want. We knew there had to be a better way.
What it does
- Takes a link to an Amazon product page and provides the user with a list of pros and cons of the given product
- Provides users with the ability to have the results read to them using text-to-speech in their browser
- Allows users to enter their email address to have the results emailed to them
How we built it
We used the TERN stack:
- Twilio to allow users to have the results emailed to them
- Express.js to create an API endpoint
- React to build the frontend
- Node.js to build the backend
We also used Python to get reviews from Amazon and output a list of pros and cons using Selenium and the ChatGPT API.
Challenges we ran into
We had trouble making it run in a non-local environment, but that was more due to our inexperience with using the tools provided by cloud service providers than any inherent issues with the app. We also spent a lot more time than we wanted to working on our user interface.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The application usually does a good job of summarizing the reviews that it receives, and we were able to create a simple but effective frontend for the application.
What we learned
- Gained a lot of experience working with the TERN stack
- Learned about how Selenium can be used to assist with web scraping
- Gained some experience using the ChatGPT API
What's next for SummarEase
The next step would be adding an additional feature to compare and contrast the reviews of Amazon products. We would also want to host it using a cloud service provider and the domain that we registered (SummarEase.tech). Finally, it would also be nice to make our service work on different websites.
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