Inspiration
Parakeet the name is inspired by parakeets who are famous for being extremely efficient communicators. This project takes modern pedagogical methods like the flipped classroom model to an inevitable next step. As technology is growing by leaps and bounds, teaching and education is bound to catch up. Parakeet aims to make lectures and educational content smarter and more accessible given the era of information that we live in.
What it does
Parakeet makes online educational content smart and accessible by making lecture videos searchable by their content. Parakeet is a platform where students can consume content personalized according to their needs.
How we built it
The platform itself is a web application built using Node.js and express with MongoDB being used as the NoSQL database to store and search video transcripts. Speech recognition for transcriptions is being done by utilizing the extremely useful and open source CMUSphinx speech recognition toolkit. We are making use of the Sphinx4 Java library to recognize speech and using SphinxBase and SphinxTrain toolchains to train and adapt the acoustic model used by the Sphinx4 library.
Challenges we ran into
- Working with big videos that are really difficult to process
- Vast inaccuracies in the speech recognition model which was heavily improved by updating the acoustic model.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Making it all work together at the end given the few hurdles in our way.
What we learned
We learnt about speech recognition and playing with APIs.
What's next for Parakeet
A complete educationational platform that does not only provide searchable lecture videos but is a resource for both professors and students as it will provide analytical insights on what aspects of the lectures and the class that students tend to search for. This will help in two way communication in something like lecture watching which is seen as a one way process.
Built With
- cmusphinx
- css3
- express.js
- html5
- java
- javascript
- node.js
- sphinx4
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