YourSG

Inspiration

We want to provide personalised news to you fellow Singaporeans.

For our SG citizens, we also have a plan. For the SG. We have a SG, we have a together at SG plan. We care!

YourSG is my SG. This is our SG! We care about SG, and we know you too care about SG too. Therefore, we bring you a personalised news aggregator AI-enabled social platform, where we bring you curated summarized Singapore-related news catered specially for you. Best in Singapore, JB and some say Batam (ownself check ownself).

What it does

As aforementioned, our objective is to ensure you have access to news that you care about. We understand that Singaporeans are all busy (we're the most overworked nation --- effects of pro-business, pro-worker model), and we want to deliver relevant bite-sized snippets of information in a multitude of formats!

Using Natural Language Processing textual entailment and clustering algorithms to recommend you the best matching topics to you, want you to enjoy consuming information in the most convenient and compatible way possible.

There will be 4 main formats:

News and media articles: These are aggregated from various news and social-media sources, from #1 to #160, all to bring you the latest essential news pieces using AI model HuggingFace text summarizer.
Trending videos: Hot videos from Youtube, instagram, tiktok, etc will be incorporated into our application to let you keep up with the latest major navy stories or exciting episodes about our wonderful multi-racial community.
Audio bites: We allow users to tune in to our local digital radios as well as provide text-to-speech features on the news articles. By training our cutting edge AI-models on local data, we plan to let you listen to voices with the local Singlish feels on-the-go!
Emergency channel: Bearing in mind that the gahmen may possibly want to reach out to us citizens, we have provisioned for push notifications to users so that ah-gong may make important announcements such as Phase 2 Less Heightened Alert, or even statistical or graphical data on the latest Covid trends.

How we are building it

We currently have a prototype in Figma, and here's the link (attached in the project submission). We plan to deploy it with FastAPI Python backend and Javascript-based frontend, and are also considering auto-scaling and load balancing with cloud computing solutions such as AWS.

Challenges we face

We currently have the necessary skills and technical capabilities to implement the application, but not during the ideation sprint. One foreseeable challenge would be to train a local AI voice, as we may require significant local voice data in order to achieve good results in the text-to-speech. However, we can always fall-back on pre-trained models (non-local) first, and possibly try a few-shot transfer learning.

Additional considerations (UIUX perspective)

This is a UX hackathon hor?

Right, and so we designed YourSG around one-handed operations. We want YourSG to be seamless and fused within your daily (busy) activities, not as yet another app to open to fulfil an objective.

Just contents. The home screen are just one scrollable screen with cards containing contents curated for you. Emerging situation updates, trending videos, any Singapore government-issued announcements, etc., all are fetched right to the screen, and all you need to do is scroll.
Ambidextrous menu. A pop-up navigation menu appears when you scroll up, and hides when you scroll down to enjoy your content. And, you might be holding the pole in an MRT or bus, sipping coffee, or holding groceries. YourSG can determine if you are using left or right thumb to scroll down, and display the pop-up on left or right side of the screen, allowing you to jump through your content with only one hand. Cool, ah!
Simplicity is key. YourSG does not need many screens nor many functions, text boxes, or buttons. The hard works of curating contents happen in the cloud with our state-of-the-art algorithm. So, just tap, scroll, and sip away.