Why I Built an AI Book Screener

Why I Built an AI Book Screener

How a real parenting friction point became an AWS Party Rock app

Image created by Author using Nano Banana with iterative prompting

You know those small but persistent problems? The ones we let slide until it becomes too much?

And then this pain point turns into an inflection point. And something good finally comes out of it!

Well, my app BookSafe Scout was born in such a fashion.

Origin Story

My first child is an avid reader. Always has been.

Like every first-time parent, I monitor for safety. Books are not an exception. I check what she reads and cull as necessary.

Problem is as she grew older, her vocabulary and speed improved, and so did my responsibility of ensuring that the books she was reading are not only age appropriate but also in line with the values my spouse and I wanted her to retain. That’s where the persistent problem arose.

Let me describe exactly what that scenario goes like.

We’re in our local library’s kiddie section where I am attending to my little one. My sweet first born excitedly skips over, arm full of books. She’s giddy at the ‘loot’ she’s determined to bring home. Then she remembers she’s got few new authors or genres she wants to borrow.

And her face changes. I can see the enthusiasm exit her body.

Why?

Because I’m going to be checking if that book is age appropriate or not, right there. I have to assess if it has sensitive content, gore, ideology I am not fine with (for her age), and the usual suspects parents guard their kids against. The process is manual, what with corralling reviews and speed reading and scanning for trigger warnings. It’s time consuming, tedious and cruel.

Yes, cruel. As an avid reader myself, I know the sin of keeping a bookworm from her books.

Friction, angst, frustration and drama.

I am a conscientious mom- so the guilt of stalling a child who is voluntarily choosing books over all the digital nonsense she could be mired in kept building up.

[And for those who are thinking- it’s just a few. Didn’t she have an armful of books? Why do you think we have an entire industry on binky-weaning, blankie-weaning, register-shelf dressing? Psychology, my friend! IFKYK!]

Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash

Solution Deep Dive

Now that the context is set, what do you think solved my problem.

ME!

Just kidding, LLMs. Hopefully you paid attention to the title and the image above and knew that AI was the answer.

Thanks to Claude and AWS Party Rock and a few productive iterations, I was able to create a nice little app that takes title and author as input and spews the following outputs

• Content analysis across multiple sources — Goodreads, user reviews, awards and text as available
• Sentiment analysis from parental threads and reviews surfacing common trigger points as well as educational value
• Book discussion questions so I can have conversations after she’s done with reading the book. (let’s face it- why would I build a separate app for that? Think end to end my friend!)

The objective with this app is not to replace judgement or guidance but offload the grunt work. The conversation and responsibility is still in my safekeeping , simply minus the laborious consolidation and analysis.

Kiddo gets her books, I can go back to raising a responsible reader without lengthy stalling and the book discussions are our newest favorite thing to do!

Photo by Rob Hampson on Unsplash

Summary

This is a small example of AI and ML application to save time and effort. And that is valuable. Gen AI, ML, LLMs- all are tools. Use them wisely and you can thrive. Done correctly, they will erase or minimize pain points.

I now have this app bookmarked on my phone. It’s free to use but priceless for the time and friction I have effectively tackled.

And it echoes what Kamil Banc, of AI Adopters Club fame, recently phrased on his Substack.

Is the tool making your judgement sharper or replacing it?

Stay on the right side of that line.

What is your take? Share as responses below.

Another example of AI for countering exasperation:

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