HN Showcase
Back to browse
ActorRise - Find the perfect monologue less than 20 seconds

ActorRise - Find the perfect monologue less than 20 seconds

by canberkvarli·Feb 16, 2026·1 point·0 comments
Visit ProjectView on HN

AI Analysis

●●SolidNiche GemWizardry
The Take

Natural-language search over a curated 8,600-piece monologue corpus is a tidy answer to a real pain — no more wading through entire plays or brittle filter UIs. The site pairs pgvector + LangChain for semantic ranking and even ships an "Overdone" filter to surface less-seen pieces, which is a nice product touch; the real test will be snippet quality, metadata (age/gender/length) and how licensing limits access to full texts.

Category
AI/ML
Target Audience

Actors, drama students, acting teachers, casting directors

Post Description

Actor and software engineer here. Built this because I was tired of spending hours reading plays to find one decent audition monologue.

Existing platforms like Backstage have ~1,100 pieces and most are overdone. I scraped and cleaned data from 172+ plays to build a database of 8,600+ monologues.

The AI search lets you describe what you need naturally: "funny piece for woman in 20s about career anxiety" instead of clicking through age/genre filters.

Tech stack: Next.js, FastAPI, PostgreSQL with pgvector, LangChain for semantic search.

Free tier available. Would love feedback from the HN community on the search experience and technical implementation.

Similar Projects

Open Source●●Solid

UltraPlot 2.0 – semantic legends, better layouts, faster imports

They rebuilt core legend and colorbar internals into dedicated builders and added a new layout solver — that’s tangible engineering work on the parts of Matplotlib that actually frustrate people. Lazy-loading to cut import time is a nice pragmatic win for large environments, but this is an incremental, well-crafted improvement for Matplotlib users rather than a category‑changing product.

Niche GemWizardry
cvanelteren
303mo ago
Education●●Solid

Generate lesson slides, homework and revision notes for UK teachers

The product nails the teacher workflow: pick subject/level/topic, get structured slides plus homework and revision notes, then export classroom-ready PPTX/DOCX/PDF. The obvious trade-offs are upfront — outputs need human checking and the demo notes warn about SVG diagram errors and clipping — but having syllabus-aligned exports and quick AI tweaks makes it genuinely useful for busy teachers.

Niche GemSolve My Problem
sarjann
203mo ago