The Usher
Your AI movie expert — find what to watch and where, without all the clutter.
Timeline
2-3 weeks
The Problem
When my husband and I sit down for movie night, sometimes the streaming app doesn't show the Rotten Tomatoes score. So my husband will ask me to look it up. Google and IMDB give you everything you'd want to know about the movie, and often the score is a couple clicks away. Other times, we'll think of a movie but we don't know where to find it.
The Solution
I built The Usher to help me find what I want quickly — the RT score and where to stream it. And for when I want any other information, I implemented a chat interface with a movie expert to answer any question I have.
How AI Is Used
The "Ask the Usher" feature uses Claude as a conversational movie expert that is constrained to answering questions about the movie page you're on. And I added another chat widget to the home screen to answer questions about any movie and make recommendations.
Tech Stack
A web and mobile stack connected to movie databases and Claude for conversational recommendations.
What I Learned
This is a very simple app. But a key decision I made was to constrain the AI to the movie page you're on, which means it answers questions based on the data it's trained on. This means it doesn't stray from being a movie expert (and doesn't search the web when it doesn't know something). But its data is always 1-2 years old. So The Usher doesn't know much about new movies.