NotebookLM-inspired AI Document Platform

Backend Developer / AI Integration · 2025 · 2 weeks · 1 min read

Academic team project combining FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Docker, AWS and generative AI for document processing and summarization.

Overview

A containerized application inspired by NotebookLM, with a React frontend, FastAPI backend, PostgreSQL persistence and generative AI integration.

Problem

Create a workflow for extracting and summarizing information from uploaded documents while keeping responses grounded in the available material.

Constraints

  • Coordinate document processing, persistence and AI requests across application components.
  • Keep local and cloud environments reproducible through containers and versioned configuration.

Approach

Combined a FastAPI backend, PostgreSQL data model and LangChain-based document workflow in a containerized application architecture deployed on AWS.

Key Decisions

Use FastAPI as the backend framework.

Reasoning:

Its typed request models and asynchronous support fit the API and AI integration workflow.

Use Docker for environment parity.

Reasoning:

A shared container configuration kept local development and deployment environments consistent across the team.

Trade-off:

The initial setup added configuration work, but reduced environment-specific differences later.

Tech Stack

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • LangChain
  • PostgreSQL
  • Docker
  • AWS
  • React

Result & Impact

Delivered a working academic prototype connecting document ingestion, relational persistence and AI-assisted summarization in a reproducible containerized environment.

Learnings

  • Grounding generative AI responses in uploaded document context.
  • Coordinating relational persistence with an AI processing workflow.
  • Containerized deployment and environment parity.