ock

Inspiration

• We skip class a lot, and office hours are limited and inconvenient.
• Parents and professors say “go to your TA,” but TAs are only available a few hours a week.
• Studying alone is slow, fragmented, and full of context switching.
• We wanted to bring the TA to the student instead of the student chasing help.

What it does

• ock is an always-available, course-trained Teaching Assistant.
• It sees your screen while you study and listens as you ask questions.
• It explains concepts using your exact notes, textbook, and course language.
• It responds conversationally and teaches step by step like a real TA.

How we built it

• Users upload course PDFs which are ingested into a course-scoped knowledge base.
• Wispr Flow converts live voice questions into text.
• Screen sharing provides visible context like equations or diagrams.
• Retrieved notes and screen context are compressed with The Token Company.
• Gemini generates TA-style explanations.
• ElevenLabs speaks the response back naturally.

Challenges we ran into

• Mapping vague references like “this part” to screen context reliably.
• Balancing fast responses with explanations that actually teach.
• Managing latency across speech, vision, retrieval, and generation.
• Enforcing guardrails so answers stay grounded in course materials.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

• Built a live, voice-first, screen-aware TA experience end to end.
• Achieved conversational explanations that feel human and calm.
• Successfully integrated multiple sponsor APIs into one smooth flow.
• Maintained course-specific grounding instead of generic chatbot answers.

What we learned

• Students care more about clarity and flow than perfect answers.
• Screen context drastically improves relevance and understanding.
• Teaching tone and pacing matter as much as correctness.
• Latency compounds fast in multimodal systems and must be designed for early.

What’s next for ock

• Smarter vision understanding and reference selection.
• On-screen overlays for citations and callouts.
• Multi-course support and richer session history.
• Deeper personalization to adapt explanations to each student’s learning style.

Built With

• 11labs
• gemini
• swift
• trae
• wispr