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  fact-check result

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  whatsapp bot integration

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  public figures with credebility scores

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  chrome extension

🛡️ TruthPulse - Multimodal, Multiplatform Fact-Checker

Inspiration

Misinformation affects everything from elections to public health. Fact-checking today is slow, fragmented, and often reactive. We wanted to create a tool that makes truth accessible instantly—wherever misinformation spreads—whether that's WhatsApp, social media, or random forwarded images.

What it does

TruthPulse is a fact-checking platform that works across a web app, WhatsApp bot, and browser extension. Users can input text, images, or URLs and receive a response with a verdict, explanation, and sources. It uses live web search and AI to check claims and also caches similar ones to improve performance and reduce cost.

How we built it

• Frontend: React, deployed on Vercel
  
• Backend: FastAPI, hosted on Railway
  
• Database: Supabase with PostgreSQL and vector embeddings
  
• AI Services: OpenAI for NLP, Perplexity Sonar for search
  
• Scraping: crawl4ai for collecting and cleaning news article content
  
• Messaging: Twilio for WhatsApp integration
  
• Browser Extension: Chrome Extensions
  

We also added caching using OpenAI embeddings to avoid repeating similar fact-checks.

Challenges we ran into

• Coordinating multiple APIs at multiple platforms and handling failures smoothly
• Processing multimodal inputs in a unified way
• Deploying and syncing services across platforms
• Making responses clear, structured, and source-based

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Built and deployed a working cross-platform fact-checking tool
  
• Integrated caching to reduce repeated queries
  
• Designed an intelligent dashboard for tracking accuracy and trends
  
• Enabled image and URL verification along with text input

What we learned

• Multimodal pipelines require tight coordination across services
  
• Real-time caching with embeddings is effective for reducing cost
  
• Simple messaging interfaces (like WhatsApp) can deliver huge value
  
• Good UX and fast feedback matter as much as accurate AI

What's next for TruthPulse

• Add user feedback system to improve result quality
  
• Onboard partners like media orgs or educators
  
• Use crawl4ai more extensively to build a real-time news article dataset
  

Built With

• crawl4ai
• fastapi
• openai
• react
• sonar
• supabase
• twilio