About BrainBytes

What is BrainBytes?

BrainBytes is a website which attempts to do two things:

  1. Provide a platform where users can use scrolling (which is often addictive and pointless) to a productive end.
  2. Provide a platform to allows users to be able to keep up to date with the news in a quick, engaging and efficient way.
Everyday, we use AI to summarise each news article and display it in the form of a 'reel'/TikTok. I want this website to help people stop scrolling on TikTok and instead start scrolling for a productive end.


Technical Explanation

  1. Every day starting from 9:30, a script runs to scrape the raw news from the Sydney Morning Herald's RSS Feed.
  2. Another program will run that will clean the raw data and format it into a style that is suitable for the AI to understand.
  3. This cleaned-up data is then passed into OpenAI's API to summarise the article (if I had more time, I would like to train a local LLM to do this task).
  4. Finally, the summarised information, along with the title, an image from the article and the link ot the article is displayed in a card-based format

    5. (I learnt frontend from scratch for this and it took soo much time and frustration and effort to get the frontend working, even though the backend is really the core of this project!).

Limitations

Although I'll do my best to minimise errors, there are a few limitations of this product you should be aware of before using it:

  1. The AI could summarise the article in an incorrect or misleading way.
  2. As we are getting our news sources from only one website, the summarised text is likely to be biased to whatever the Sydney Morning Herald is biased to.
  3. Some articles will not be displayed, such as articles that are purely videos or ones that exceed the AI's length capacity.

Inspiration

I came up with this idea when I looked for an app that could turn the hours I spend scrolling TikTok/reels/the internet into something productive. However, after looking on the App Store and online I couldn't really find anything.

As a result, I thought this would be a fun little website to make that could turn scrolling into learning!

Vision

My vision is for this app to be a treasure-trove of information from across the internet, ranging from topics such as Philosophy, History, the sciences, to the news, TV, film and so much more, all displayed in this 'reel' format.

My ultimate vision for this app is to be a place where anyone can learn about any topic they want by scrolling through 'bite-sized' chunks of information. Of course, this is a lot more difficult to achieve than simply summarising the news, but who knows, maybe I'll get there one day.

About Me :)

Hi! I'm a Computer Science undergraduate student in Sydney, Australia.

Contrary to what this website would have you believe, I do NOT like coding in my free time.

I like eating good food, hanging out with friends, sport, reading and playing games. (pretty generic uni student)

Check out my personal website to find out more about me: My Website!