Skimless

Skimless was my final year project for my Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Lagos. I built it to help students and researchers quickly find answers to questions in their PDFs, digital books, and articles. Having to read through a whole document to find answers to specific questions can be time-consuming and frustrating and I needed a solution to better maximize my efficiency, hence the birth of Skimless.

Methodology

The project integrates several technologies to create an interactive, AI-powered Tool. TypeScript provides type safety, ensuring reliable code across components. React.js and Next.js form the frontend, handling dynamic content rendering and routing. React-PDF enables users to view and interact with PDFs directly within the application. When a PDF is uploaded, LangChain chunks and embeds its content, storing these embeddings in Pinecone Vectorstore (Database) for fast, context-based retrieval. When users query the PDF, LangChain uses these embeddings to find relevant sections, and GPT (an LLM/AI) generates clear, human-like responses, enabling an engaging, responsive study experience.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was integrating the various technologies to create a seamless, interactive experience. I had to ensure that the frontend and backend communicated effectively, and that the application could handle large PDFs without slowing down. I also had to ensure that the AI generated accurate, relevant responses to user queries, which required extensive testing and tweaking to make sure the response/s doesn't go outside the scope of the particular document being queried.

Results

Skimless has been a huge success, with users praising its speed, accuracy, and ease of use. It has helped students and researchers save time and effort when searching for answers in their documents, and has received positive feedback from educators and industry professionals alike. I am proud of what I have accomplished with Skimless and look forward to continuing to improve and expand its capabilities in the future.

Enough talk:

Skimless is live and ready for use! You can check it out skimless

Apparently I also wrote a project report if you care to read more in-depth about skimless. You can check it out Project Report