Inspiration
One of our team members grapples with a learning disability, making technical topics a real challenge. Witnessing this firsthand drove us to develop "Tell Me About," a tool designed to distill complex subjects into understandable animations and narratives.
What it does
Upon launching "Tell Me About", users are greeted with an animated UI, offering a brief on how they're about to embark on an AI-powered, illustrative journey. As the animation unfolds, they're led to an image upload screen, where they can also select a theme for their story. Users then have a chance to edit their image, highlighting elements to retain through their narrative. Post-selection, the image is processed by an AI, describing its content. This description serves as a base, which, through intricate prompt engineering, is converted into a continuous storyline, complete with visuals that maintain the essence of the original image and voice-over narration to provide a comprehensive learning experience.
How we built it
At the core, we used a mix of Reach(Next.js) and TypeScript, complemented by the occasional CSS and HTML. To pull our data and route it, we queried a variety of APIs (Astica, GPT, DALLE, AWS S3) as well as used RESTful calls. We parsed user-input images, channeled them through various AI services, and finally presented the results in a captivating carousel.
Challenges we ran into
The laundry list is long. The initial challenge was understanding and mapping the I/O of various APIs ; types didn't line up, queries gave useless error messages, and making a clean UI/UX for the application kept us always on our toes. Additionally, our goal to build a no-backend application by using ServerSideProps and a variety of clever tricks gave us constant headaches in finding a way to circumvent the barriers of TS and API endpoints.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Two things we are very proud of is our UI/UX and our end product. The responsive UI/UX ensures every user interaction is smooth and memorable. We spent countless hours ensuring we had vibrant loading screens, engaging animations, and reactive components to guarantee that complex topics are transformed into delightful tales. The second achievement - our end product, was the tool that we made to help those with educational disabilities. Given that one of our members suffers from one, it was super positive to see a real impact in the quality of his learning as a result our tool.
What we learned
Beyond mastering the art of decoding URLs and streaming files, we dived deep into backend-less architecture. The art of dealing with imagery, especially through unique endpoints, was both a challenge and a revelation. For some of us, this was our first exposure to digging deep into TS documentation or Next.js, so that became a learning journey there as well.
What's next for Teach Me About
Our vision is to expand, to refine, and to reach more learners. By transforming dense topics into engaging stories, we believe "Tell Me About" can reshape the landscape of educational tools.
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