Clearway API

Clearway API is a web API that aims to eliminate bias, scams, and inaccessibility in the modern web.

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Inspiration

We were inspired to develop this project after being frustrated at the inaccessibility of modern websites. Ads, small fonts, you name it - another problem that made information access that much harder. Thus, Clearway was born.

What it does

Clearway extracts text from online articles (or simply takes in raw text) and processes using multiple AI and Python APIs/libraries. First, it summarizes the text using a call to OpenAI (or using a python approach as an alternative). It then analyzes the text for bias and potential scams, ensuring the source is credible. Finally, it combines the processed text into a single, clean PDF for the end user's viewing pleasure.

Clearway can do more than summarize text. It also expands accessibility for the text itself, by processing an article of text into an audio file. Using ElevenLab's text to speech features, an article and be processed and output as an MP3 file in seconds.

How we built it

We built Clearway API using FastAPI, Python, HTML, and CSS. We primarily used agentic AI such as Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex to develop and prototype at a fast pace, delegating the programming to Claude while we developed the plan for the project. Integration was handles by us at times, however.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge of this project was integration. There were many aspects we wanted to add, but couldn't (GET requests to saved results from Firebase). Being able to fit together the pieces built up caused enough issues that some tough decisions had to be made.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were most proud of the versatile text extractor, allowing us to process whatever we wanted to analyze. More importantly, we learned how to collaborate as a team (a team who met the day of the hackathon, no less)!

What we learned

The biggest thing we learned about was all the ways integration can fail. We were quite good at implementing features on their own, but fitting them together was a nightmare. The code itself was being cleanly added into folders and routes, but integrating it with Firebase was a feature that was too difficult to surmount in the time left. That doesn't mean we would give up, though.

What's next for Clearway API

For Clearway API, we would like to strive to fully develop GET requests that pull from a database of made prompts. This would allow API users to get summaries and analysis they had already made. Additionally, we wanted to explore more accessibility - such as writing articles, but in a font designed for people with Dyslexia.

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