BuildU — AI Writing and Application Dashboard
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BuildU — AI Writing and Application Dashboard

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Next.js 15
OpenAI GPT-4
Tesseract.js
TypeScript
Vercel
Live app
6
Tools shipped
GPT-4
LLM
Tesseract.js
OCR
My own job hunt
Built for

Figures

Six tools behind one dashboard: CV feedback, results tracking, an AI-text humaniser, text compare, IELTS writing practice and speech-to-text. It started as one thing I needed during my own applications and kept growing a tool every time I hit the next annoyance — which is why it looks like a dashboard rather than a product.Open full size
Six tools behind one dashboard: CV feedback, results tracking, an AI-text humaniser, text compare, IELTS writing practice and speech-to-text. It started as one thing I needed during my own applications and kept growing a tool every time I hit the next annoyance — which is why it looks like a dashboard rather than a product.
Text compare, the piece I use most. Three panes — before, changes, after — with a word-level diff rather than a line diff, so a single substituted word shows as a strikethrough and its replacement rather than repainting the whole paragraph. Word and character counts on both sides, and find-and-replace across the pair. Rewriting the same paragraph five times is the actual job when you are drafting applications in a second language, and line diffs are useless for it.Open full size
Text compare, the piece I use most. Three panes — before, changes, after — with a word-level diff rather than a line diff, so a single substituted word shows as a strikethrough and its replacement rather than repainting the whole paragraph. Word and character counts on both sides, and find-and-replace across the pair. Rewriting the same paragraph five times is the actual job when you are drafting applications in a second language, and line diffs are useless for it.
Speech-to-text over the browser's own recognition API, with live transcription, a language selector and copy-out. No audio leaves the browser and there is no transcription bill, which for a personal tool is the right trade against accuracy.Open full size
Speech-to-text over the browser's own recognition API, with live transcription, a language selector and copy-out. No audio leaves the browser and there is no transcription bill, which for a personal tool is the right trade against accuracy.

Overview

BuildU is an AI-powered university application advisor. Users upload their personal statement, transcript, or other application documents; the app extracts the text via OCR, analyses it with GPT-4, and returns personalised feedback and strategy recommendations.

OCR Pipeline

Document uploads are processed client-side with Tesseract.js, which handles PDF, PNG, and JPG inputs and produces clean plain-text output. This approach avoids server-side file storage and keeps processing fast for the end user.

AI Analysis

The extracted text is sent to OpenAI GPT-4 with a structured prompt that asks the model to: (1) identify strengths and gaps in the applicant's profile, (2) suggest target universities matched to the profile, and (3) produce specific action items to strengthen the application. The response is streamed back to the UI using Next.js server actions.

Deployment

The app is deployed on Vercel with Next.js 15 App Router, using server-side rendering for the landing page and client components for the interactive upload and results flow. Edge functions handle the GPT-4 streaming response.