Hey Product Hunters!
I'm Varun Shenoy, and this is what I've been working on for the past couple of months. Essentially, it's a personalized news summarization app for iOS. It leverages core natural language processing technology built into the iOS operating system to create fluent summaries with complementary visuals in the form of infographics. There is no back-end and all the code runs on the device, which means that it will never go down. It won me a scholarship to WWDC 2016, and I am truly excited to share it with everyone.
It's definitely something I am going to work on for a while, as it has been a great learning opportunity for me. I built it because I love the idea of summarized news, yet most of the apps on the App Store that claimed to do so were often lacking and were not cohesive enough. Being a member of my high school's Speech & Debate team also propelled my interest in summarized text. We have to stay up to date on current events, and summarized news can help us when we don't have enough time to read long and often drawn out articles. Being a freshman in high school, I will be constantly releasing new updates to make Summit even more efficient and accurate. An Apple Watch companion app is in the works as well.
I am going to be around for the rest of the day, so feel free to ask me any questions regarding the software. I'm a one man show, and thus any feedback would be much appreciated. Thank you!
@varunshenoy Hey Varun! Very good job, congrats on that. It's actually similar to what we've been developing recently (with an ML standalone backend though) and I like your approach with built-in iOS technology.
@evivz The infographics and maps are provided underneath the summary. The infographics include ring charts, money highlights, and many more when certain information is extracted from the text. The maps are shown when there is a key location found in the text.
Thanks for checking out Summit!
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I have an iphone 6 and the app crashes. Really frustrating cause this app is great to get all the information I need. What can I do?
@mario_guajardo_vanzzini Yeah, I know exactly what is going on and I'll try to push out a hotfix soon. I suggest downloading the app again and not choosing Business Insider as a source until after the patch. I believe this issue is due to problems on their feed. Thanks for the input!
@zeusoft There are actually a couple similar summarization apps, which have died out and have not been updated for quite some time. I really loved the idea of summarized text and couldn't believe that people would drop the idea. Their user interfaces were also subpar. I picked it up and made it my own 😄 Thanks for trying it out!
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Hey Varun, this is such a fantastic app. It's clean, beautifully designed and in the testing over the last few days, I'm loving it. It summarises the articles so well and I'm already saving a ton of time. I'd love to be a beta tester for this as well. I also just had a few thoughts on the app. As someone mentioned above, having Pocket integration would be amazing. If we can choose our own sources as well, that would be really beneficial. For example, I may want to choose 9to5Mac, etc. Finally, while reading an article, it would be so great having the iOS swipe to go back gesture rather than just the back arrow on the top left; one handed use on the iPhone 6s Plus is hard with that and I have to use reachability. Keep up the amazing work and congratulations on the WWDC '16 scholarship!
@varunshenoy Love the enthusiasm you have! I was probably scanning for WWE episodes when i was 14! All the best! Just noticed your green call to action buttons in the website is a lil scattered. Do fix it :)
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