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Building an AI-Powered News Search Dashboard with CopilotKit
Hey, developers! 🌟 Today, I’m excited to share my latest project: an AI-powered news search dashboard built using CopilotKit, a tool that simplifies integrating AI and other assistive features into your apps. In this post, I’ll walk through how I used CopilotKit to create a seamless news search experience with real-time AI responses.
Live Link: https://copilot-news.vercel.app/
Why CopilotKit?
CopilotKit offers powerful features for building accessible and intelligent UIs. With built-in state management, UI components, and easy-to-use APIs, it’s perfect for anyone looking to add a layer of AI-powered assistance to their applications.
Project Overview: AI News Dashboard
The goal was simple: build a dashboard where users can search for news topics and see AI-generated summaries or assistance based on their search. Here's the final structure of the project:
Frontend: Created with React, featuring a search bar, AI-driven news summaries, and a Copilot popup assistant.
Backend: A Node.js server handling requests to an external news API.
Step-by-Step Implementation
Here's how I implemented the AI-powered news search dashboard:
Step 1: Install Dependencies
First, I installed the necessary packages, including @copilotkit/react-ui for CopilotKit components and React Toastify for notifications.
Step 2: Set Up the Dashboard Component
I created a Dashboard component that manages the state and UI. This component includes a search bar, a list of news items, and a Copilot popup that guides users through the news summaries.
The imports included useState, CopilotPopup, Input, Button, Card components, Loader, X, and Search icons, plus toast notifications and the useCopilotReadable hook. This setup formed the foundation for the user experience and interactions.
Step 3: Fetch News Data from the API
I set up a helper function, fetchNews, to handle API requests to a news aggregator service. This function handles errors, displays notifications, and returns an array of news items. The function uses a POST request and manages response errors to keep users informed when no data is available.
Step 4: Integrate CopilotKit for AI Functionality
With CopilotKit’s CopilotPopup and useCopilotReadable hooks, I enabled real-time AI guidance in the component. The useCopilotReadable hook allowed me to make the state of the searched news topics accessible to the AI assistant, enabling context-aware suggestions.
Using CopilotPopup, I added a popup assistant that appears at the bottom of the screen to help guide users as they search for news. The popup assistant comes with customizable titles and prompts to create a friendly and intuitive user experience.
Step 5: Create the Search Functionality
I then added a search input and a button for user interaction. When users enter a topic and click the search button, handleSearch is triggered to fetch news articles and update the history.
The search functionality checks if a topic is entered, then retrieves results or displays messages if nothing relevant is found. It’s styled with Tailwind CSS for an elegant look and easy adaptability.
Final UI
With everything in place, the final UI consists of a header, search bar, and a responsive news grid. CopilotKit’s integration added a layer of smart AI guidance, turning a standard search tool into an interactive assistant for news discovery.
Conclusion
Integrating CopilotKit into this project made it easy to add AI assistance without heavy customization, making it a great tool for quickly adding intelligence to UI components. If you're looking to integrate similar features into your own projects, I highly recommend trying out CopilotKit!
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