Sahayak AI

AI-powered teaching assistant for India's multi-grade classrooms

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Inspiration

In many rural and under-resourced classrooms, a single teacher often has to teach multiple grades at the same time. This leads to a heavy workload of preparing lessons, designing worksheets, and keeping students engaged with limited resources.

We were inspired to create Sahayak-AI after noticing how much time teachers spend on repetitive tasks that could be automated. Our goal was to build a tool that assists teachers without replacing them, giving them more time to inspire and mentor their students.

What it does

Sahayak-AI is an AI-powered real-time teaching assistant that helps educators with:

  • Converting textbook images into grade-specific worksheets
  • Generating custom stories, explanations, and lesson ideas via voice commands
  • Creating blackboard-ready visuals for complex concepts
  • Auto-generating weekly lesson planners aligned with the syllabus

How we built it

We combined various technologies to create a smooth experience:

  • Perplexity AI API for intelligent content generation
  • Tesseract.js for extracting text from textbook images
  • React.js + Tailwind CSS for a clean, mobile-first interface
  • Firebase Hosting + Firestore for deployment and real-time data management
  • Web Speech API for voice-powered interactions

Challenges we ran into

  • Integrating multiple APIs and ensuring a smooth data flow
  • Fine-tuning the Web Speech API for accurate voice-to-text recognition
  • Dealing with OCR errors when processing low-quality textbook images
  • Building and testing the prototype under a 48-hour hackathon deadline

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built a fully functional prototype in less than 2 days
  • Designed an intuitive, teacher-friendly interface that works on both desktop and mobile
  • Successfully integrated AI, OCR, and voice into one cohesive platform
  • Created a solution that can save teachers hours of prep time

What we learned

  • How to integrate AI services with OCR and speech technologies into a single app
  • The importance of designing for accessibility and simplicity in EdTech
  • How to work under pressure, prioritize features, and still deliver a working solution
  • That small improvements in teacher productivity can make a huge difference in classrooms

What's next for Sahayak AI

We see Sahayak-AI as more than just a hackathon project. Here’s what we plan to do:

  • Expand language support for local and regional classrooms
  • Add analytics to help teachers track student progress
  • Build a mobile app version for offline use
  • Improve AI with personalization for different grades and subjects
  • Partner with schools and NGOs to pilot Sahayak-AI in real classrooms

Our vision is simple: every teacher deserves a smart assistant that makes teaching easier and learning more engaging.

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