Overview
Knowledge is power, but too much information can be overwhelming. Taim aims to simplify the complex landscape of digital content. Our mobile app uses AI to summarize articles and YouTube videos, creating digests in three customizable formats.
We've all been there — sitting on the couch scrolling through our phones, only to get caught in the net of a clickbait article. Sometimes, we end up spending more time on an article than initially intended, wading through unnecessary details and jargon. Alternatively, have you ever stumbled upon an intriguing but lengthy article and wished you could quickly gauge its worth? Or perhaps you've considered diving into a two-hour-long YouTube podcast but hesitated, wondering if it would be time well spent?
There are Chrome extensions and chat plugins designed to summarize texts, but what if you are lounging on your couch with just your iPhone in hand? Enter Taim: the mobile application designed to bring efficiency into your daily content consumption.
Curiosity is the first step to innovation
When OpenAI released its API, the urge to explore its capabilities was irresistible for us at Nomtek. Our first experiment was an internal plugin that not only pulled the week's most significant tech news from Feedly but also summarized them into digestible bits. This tool helped our team save more than 10 hours a month, time that could be better spent on creative or problem-solving tasks.
Taim helps consume valuable information faster
Encouraged by the efficiency and usefulness of our internal tool, we decided to bring this technology to a device that rarely leaves your side — your smartphone. Taim is the result of our experiments and learnings with AI, designed to be your go-to solution for quick summaries of articles and YouTube videos.
Taim: Project Assumptions
The goal behind Taim was to help users consume and manage information more effectively. From the start, we were designing Taim to maximize user experience.
Project assumptions
- Users value efficiency and prefer not to be overwhelmed with excessive information.
- Native sharing capabilities to let Taim work across various platforms and tools (sharing a link directly to Taim to get a summary), compatible with Chrome, YouTube, Safari, and other popular applications.
- Users may want summaries in varying lengths and forms based on their specific needs.
- A multi-language feature to broaden the app's user base.
- A simple user-based rating system for feedback and product iterations.
- Data privacy is a critical concern for most users today. No need to set up an account.
- Design should be minimalist, to focus on the most effective user experience
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How We Built Taim: Process and Lessons Learned
Step 1: Working on architecture
When it comes to building a mobile application that relies on cutting-edge AI capabilities, the choice of technologies is paramount. Here's how we approached the architecture of Taim.
Multi-platform availability
Taim is not just another mobile application — it's a comprehensive solution that consists of:
- Mobile app for iOS: Designed to leverage Apple's ecosystem, providing a seamless experience for iPhone users.
- Mobile app for Android: Engineered to be fast, responsive, and intuitive across a variety of Android devices.
- Backend app: Serves as the bridge that facilitates communication with language learning models (LLM).
Choosing Flutter for mobile frontend
We chose Flutter for both the iOS and Android mobile apps. This decision allowed our development team to be more agile, focusing on feature-rich development and rapid delivery. Flutter has been an instrumental choice right from the prototyping phase through development. The framework enabled us to maintain a smaller, more focused team without compromising on quality or speed.
Using Fastify for backend
Our backend application is crafted using Node.js with Fastify as the web framework. Fastify is designed for efficiency and a low learning curve, enabling us to build a robust backend that can handle the complexities of interacting with AI tools while being easy to maintain.
The LangChain and Helicone Combo for LLM
Interfacing with Language Learning Models (LLM) like OpenAI requires specialized tools. We leveraged two primary frameworks for this:
- LangChain: A comprehensive toolset that has become a standard in developing applications based on LLMs. It streamlines the development process, allowing us to focus on user experience and core functionality.
- Helicone: This is our go-to monitoring tool for LLM. It lets us keep tabs on costs, monitor prompts, and even implement caching for repeated articles. This real-time insight is crucial for maintaining the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of Taim.

The blend of these technologies ensures that Taim is not just another app but a well-thought-out solution designed to improve the way we consume information.
Step 2: Navigating the unpredictable: building products with AI
Incorporating AI into mobile applications brings a new layer of complexity, especially when dealing with non-deterministic technologies like language learning models (LLMs). Non-determinism, in the context of LLMs, means that the model can produce different outputs even when given the same input. This adds an extra layer of unpredictability that developers need to account for. While the possibilities are vast, so are the responsibilities.
Step 3: Moderating content for ethical compliance
AI, especially when interacting with external, user-generated content, can sometimes produce unexpected or inappropriate outputs. To mitigate this risk, Taim incorporates a text moderation step before summarization. We utilize a dedicated endpoint specifically designed to flag any content that violates ethical guidelines, such as hate speech or other inappropriate content. This ensures that the summaries generated align with societal norms and ethical considerations. We recommend starting with OpenAI's guidelines, which lays out comprehensive safety practices.
Step 4: The art of crafting prompts
Prompts in AI-driven applications are far from typical code fragments — they’re the questions that tell AI what you want from it. A well-crafted prompt can yield highly usable and accurate outputs, while a poorly-designed prompt can produce irrelevant or incorrect information. Throughout the development process, we experimented with dozens of different prompts for Taim's summarization feature.
To fine-tune this aspect, we developed an internal tool using Retool, which let us rate the quality of generated prompts and their respective summaries. Each team member could provide their subjective feedback, which was then compiled to identify which prompts resulted in the most accurate and useful summaries. This iterative, human-in-the-loop approach was invaluable for refining Taim’s AI components.

Which Methods We Didn't Use and Why?
In the realm of software development, striking a balance between quality and cost is crucial, especially for products aiming to scale. It's also important not to jump the gun by introducing complex optimizations prematurely. With Taim, we started with a prototype-focused approach, aiming to build an MVP that addresses the core needs of our users without unnecessary complexities. Below are some of the technologies and approaches we considered but ultimately decided to set aside.
Embeddings
The core idea of Taim is to succinctly summarize YouTube videos and articles. Even the longest articles and video subtitles are usually short enough to fit within the OpenAI context window. If not, Taim can easily manage it using a map-reduce algorithm to process larger chunks of text.
We considered adding embeddings as a feature to our app, especially because they could enable functionalities like search and article similarity. We decided to hold off on embeddings for several reasons:
- Most articles and YouTube videos can be fully summarized without text chunking.
- We want to prioritize user privacy and minimize data storage.
- Articles and their summaries are often read and used only once, making the need for search or similarity features less immediate.
Caching
We decided against using specialized caching techniques like GPTCache for cost optimization. Instead, we opted for the basic cache available through the Helicone platform. Implementing more advanced caching methods like GPTCache would necessitate the use of embeddings, which we chose to avoid for the reasons mentioned above.
GPT-4
While GPT-4 is the latest and greatest, Taim currently operates on GPT-3.5. We found that for the purpose of text summarization, GPT-3.5 is adequate. Sometimes, crafting a better prompt with GPT-3.5 can yield results just as good as those from GPT-4 but at a lower cost. Additionally, GPT-4 has stringent limitations, especially when it comes to tokens per minute. We are, however, in the process of allowing users to switch between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in Taim's settings.
Translating content to English
When using LLMs like OpenAI, you pay for the number of tokens processed. The number of tokens varies by language. For example, English typically uses fewer tokens compared to languages like German. Although translating content to English can be cost-effective, especially for recurrent tasks, we chose not to do it in Taim for several reasons:
- The summaries are usually generated only once.
- The cost of translating text would outweigh the token savings.
- Double translation (from the source language to English and back) can introduce inaccuracies.

By being judicious in our tech choices, we've made Taim not just powerful, but also efficient and user-friendly. Future iterations might include some of these omitted features as the app's needs evolve.
Use Cases of GenTech AI in Mobile
Real-time content summarization
By utilizing text summarization technologies like OpenAI's GPT models, mobile apps now offer on-the-go, real-time summarization features for users. Summarization apps like Taim decrease the time it takes to sift through lengthy articles or transcripts.
AI-driven personal tutor app
Artificial intelligence reimagines the possibilities of education by employing algorithms to provide real-time, personalized tutoring. Adaptive learning combined with interactive study materials create an effective and affordable digital education tool.
Personalized language learning
An app that uses AI algorithms to dissect your pronunciation, sentence structure, and vocabulary to provide highly personalized and contextual learning modules. The biggest benefit is that it adapts its teaching style and topics based on your performance and engagement level.
Real-time translation and interpretation
Leveraging AI, the smartphone microphone, and speaker, a mobile app could offer real-time translation during conversations. This could be particularly useful for travelers or international business.
AI-powered personal journaling
A journaling app could collect your thoughts and use sentiment analysis and natural language processing (NLP) to provide daily mood insights, analyze long-term emotional trends, and suggest tailored content to change your mood.
Smart home control and energy management
With the use of AI algorithms, a mobile app can function as the brain of your smart home. It can analyze energy usage patterns, recommend energy-saving settings, and control smart devices around the house.
Saving Time with GenTech-Powered Apps
We're excited about what taim can offer, and we believe it’s a great way to get the most valuable insights in much less time. If you're interested in gaining access to Taim, we'd be delighted to share it with you — just reach out.
Contact us now to learn more or to kickstart a discussion on the future of mobile and AI.

Transparency Disclaimer: Please note that this case study was collaboratively generated with the assistance of ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI.