Summify: A Team Effort to Conquer Information Overload

Inspiration:

As a team, we noticed a common problem: lots of reading is needed to understand complex ideas, especially in subjects like biology. One of us, a student who's great at math but finds dense theoretical subjects tough, came up with the idea for Summify. We realized this wasn't just a personal problem – many students and professionals feel overwhelmed by too much information. This gave us the idea to build something that makes information easier to find and understand.

What it Does:

Summify helps by giving clear and short summaries of documents, showing only the important information and leaving out the extra stuff. Summify can also explain documents, which helps students and professionals who have trouble understanding key points. It also has a Q&A section where users can test their knowledge and learn more. Plus, there's an AI chat where users can ask questions about the documents to get a better understanding. Basically, Summify helps users get a much better grasp of any document or information.

How We Built It:

We built Summify using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Vite, using the Gemini API for the AI part. Vite helped us keep the project organized, making it easier to work on and fix bugs. We added lots of comments to our code to help each other understand it better. We divided the work so that one person handled the HTML, two worked on the CSS, and two worked on the JavaScript. We worked together and got it done!

Challenges We Faced:

First, we had trouble keeping the project organized. We solved this by using Vite to break the code into smaller parts.

Next, when we first put the project online, it worked fine during development, but it didn't work at all when we launched it! After looking into it, we figured out we needed to change some settings in Vite and GitHub.

Because some of us used phones to code (we didn't all have computers), we had to design Summify for phones first. Making it look good on computers after that was hard, but we did it!

The JavaScript part got really complex. We tried to keep things simple, but it was tough. Still, we managed to finish it.

The biggest challenge was making the PDF download feature work. pdfMake worked fine while we were building it, but it stopped working when we launched it. We tried lots of things – changing settings, using different code, and trying other tools for making PDFs – but nothing worked. We really wanted this feature, so we kept trying until we found pdfDocs, which let us make a PDF file from the summary and use a link to let people download it with a title the AI created.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of:

Finishing Summify using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is a big accomplishment, especially with all the features it has. We're also really proud that we solved a common problem – how hard it is to understand information quickly. Helping people understand complex ideas more easily is something we feel really good about.

What We Learned:

Building Summify taught us a lot: working together better, solving problems creatively, being patient, and writing clean code. We also learned a lot about launching a project and fixing problems that come up.

What's Next for Summify:

With more resources, we want to make Summify apps for phones and tablets. This will make it easier to use and let us add features like getting notifications about summaries and automatically getting explanations of text while you read.

Built With

• css
• gemini-api
• html
• javascript
• jsdocs
• vite