News2Reel

Inspiration

I’d never shipped a project solo before—I wanted to see what Bolt.new (and myself) are capable of and try to create something useful in one shot. When I saw Tavus overlay a live webpage with a talking avatar, I saw a great opportunity to create engaging, relevant content in a YouTube Shorts format to grow my audience.

What it does

News2Reel turns any news article URL into a bite-sized YouTube Short with an AI presenter narrating over a scrolling page backdrop.

How I built it

• Bolt.new for UI & serverless logic
  
• Firecrawl API to scrape article content
  
• Google Gemini API for context research & script generation
  
• Tavus API to fetch real presenter replicas and render the video
  

Challenges I ran into

• Nailing down that “one-shot” prompt to link everything together
  

Accomplishments I’m proud of

• My first-ever end-to-end solo app!
  

What I learned

• How to orchestrate multiple AI APIs in one seamless pipeline
  
• The importance of clear loading states and graceful error handling
  
• Balancing rapid prototyping with production best practices

What’s next for News2Reel

• Secure API key management
  
• Add more presenter options
  
• Support multiple export formats (MP4, GIF, WebM)
  
• Integrate social sharing analytics
  

Built With

• bolt.new
• firecrawl
• gemini
• netlify
• react
• tavus
• typescript