Audary

Never take lecture notes again. An audio summary is only a click away.

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Slide Desk/Presentation: Click Here

Inspiration

As students ourselves we are well aware of how many man hours are spent in lecture. These age-old institutional traditions find very different adoptions by those who attend. Some students spend these hours taking minute-detailed notes, while others find themselves catching a quick nap. We’re here to cater to both sides of this spectrum and improve this student experience.

In our Hack-storming session we discussed how under-utilized and unchanging our system of note taking has been since the dawn of schooling. Students come in, sit down, and switch between listening and transcribing a teacher’s lesson. What if we could change this? What if we could eliminate in-class note taking, improve student attention, cater to all types of students, and while we’re at it, reduce language barriers.

What it does

With our web application, students can come into class, click a record button, and let us transcribe and summarize the lecture for them. All users have to do is record a given lecture, and the rest is abstracted away for them. After the lecture is over, they have access to the original audio recording, transcription of the recording, a summary of that recording, and the ability to translate this transcription (or summary) into a language of their choosing.

How we built it

Our Frontend was built with CSS, HTML5, and JavaScript. Our Internal Backend was built with MongoDB, Play. Our External Backend pipeline leverages the Google Speech (to Text) API, the SMMRY API, and Microsoft's Translation Text API (a part of their Cognitive Services).

Challenges we ran into

Time constraints forced a restricted implementation of the pipeline outputting to the internal back-end and front-end connection. A couple hours more and we would've been able to pass our user WAV file into the pipeline process in an elegant front-end fashion.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The entire team is proud of the work put into adapting the series of API frameworks leveraged to make this project possible. (Props to Miguel and his work put in there.)

What we learned

We learned about Google's, Microsoft's, and SMMRY's APIs, and expanded our experience in the other software used in the project design (Play, MongoDB, HTML5, etc).

What's next for Audary

Of course our Hack doesn’t stop in applicability with a classroom. Teachers could publish their lectures, corporate applications are abundant (from interviews to meetings), the app could easily be adapted on a country basis, and there are sure to be use cases we missed. Best of all, because our backbone is based through company APIs, as they improve, so will our application. There’s no need for continuous updates and improvements on our end. Once one of the three APIs is improved, or project is by extension suddenly a better iteration of itself.

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