preppt. | Devpost

Home page - shows analytics
Stage - create projects and preps
History - look back on past projects and improvement

A major/widespread issue in society that almost everyone struggles with at some point, including me, is speaking in front of an audience. But it is also one of the most stressful problems. Yet, it is one of the most fundamental skills to become successful.

The problem: We all want to improve our presenting, pitching, and just speaking skills in general, but how? You may not always have someone there to listen, judge and critique every single attempt you do.

So we implemented preppt. - shorthand for preparation.ppt, a standalone software with AI integration that can quantitatively analyze your breathing, heartrate, facial expressions, and even filler words, and shows specific timestamp where you fell short. We wanted to use this hackathon as a way to solve one of the major issues in our lives, and ironically, also help us to prepare the presentation for this hackathon.

We built our project with typescript, node.js, react, express, and electron. The biggest thing we learnt is systems design. We had to manage a codebase with almost 100 files, some such that the code line counts are in the thousands, under a time constraint. This was clearly on a whole other scale from our personal projects.

Challenges we faced are working with new, specialized sponsor technology and having to learn that on the fly, and fast. Our team's members were all from different backgrounds, one of us being a more hardware-focused person, and another specializing in spring boot. As a result, it was very difficult for us to converge on one coherent idea. During implementation, we faced many walls with the new APIs such as tigerdata not writing to the database and also did not work on school wifi. Which caused alot confusion. Presage was sampling too quickly, and sometimes inaccurate due to document specifications. Which we were able to overcome with extensively reviewing their documentation and going back to our codebase.

Overall, we learnt a lot, and we do not regret building this.