Introducing HeyRecap
2024-03-12
HeyRecap is the next evolution of Recap Roswell, a project using LLMs to create easily readable summaries for the Roswell City Council.
I started this project with two main goals: 1. When I moved to Roswell, I wanted to get more involved with my local government, but figured I should learn about it before I got involved. To my surprise, despite the nearly $200M city budget, there was very little local news coverage to help me figure out what was happening locally. 2. I wanted to develop a better understanding for how LLMs can be used to solve everyday problems. My hypothesis here was that I could create a system that did a good enough job summarizing the meetings that it isn't worth sending a person to cover.
The first version of the project was a python script that created a summary which I copied and pasted into a Ghost newsletter. This was a great way to get started — to my surprise, ~150 others in Roswell were also interested in this — but it really limited my ability to customize the user experience and it was clear that it wasn't going to be able to scale beyond just my local city council. Plus the copying and pasting was tedious!
So this fall, I set out to build an end-to-end app, the result of which you can see at heyrecap.com. For users, there are two primary benefits to the new site:
- Full meeting transcripts - Easily search for the specific information behind the summary without having to watch the entire video.
- Customizable email preferences - Users can choose to get email updates for all recorded city meetings, not just city council meetings.
For me, this was a chance to build an app end-to-end with a real, if small, audience, while getting to know my city better. I used NextJS and hosted it on Render. Summaries are produced with transcripts from Deepgram. Clerk is providing me with user authentication services (love them) and Resend with email services. My UI components are provided by shad/cn UI. I have opinions about all of these and may write more about them in the future, but for now I'll just say that it's incredible to have so many services so easily stitched together at my fingertips. More often than not, someone else has done 90% of the hard, frustrating stuff so that you can just integrate it with your project. It's awesome.
Over the next several months, I hope to explore what it looks like to scale this some. I'm not sure there is a business here per se, but I'm interested in the idea that I can run a useful local news organization as a side project using AI. We'll see what comes form it!