Seedlings

Inspiration

As students, we take notes to both help us understand content and to use as a reference for the future. Notes can be difficult to take in an efficient way, especially when we are recording information on live presentations. Therefore, we wanted to make a Chrome extension that can be used on top of note taking documents, while potentially watching videos or live lectures.

What it does

The chrome extension contains two features: speech to text generator and a note formatter. The prior opens up a window where text is generated from live speech and this way, students can reference a continuously updated transcript of the lecture while taking notes. They can refer back to things their teachers said that they might have forgotten or hadn’t had the time to write down. As for the note formatter feature, this allows students to quickly organize their notes in neat bullet points grouped together based on content. This frees up a lot more time for students to focus on the lecture at hand.

How we built it

We used react coupled with html for versatility and ensure functionality as a Chrome extension. For the speech to text, we used the Web Speech API and for the note auto formatter, we used the Gemini API.

Challenges we ran into

Our entire team is very new to web development and have never built a Chrome extension. Navigating which platforms to use

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of developing a react app with little to no experience in react and JS and we made this functional as a Chrome extension, another major achievement. Further we were able to implement and refine two complex features and combine them into one.

What we learned

We’ve learned a lot about using HTML, CSS, and JS with React, researching and using open source code/APIs, and how to organize and plan for a short-term project as a team. As beginners to web development, we took on a challenging project because we wanted to work on multiple different solutions to creating an efficient note taking app. We learned how to integrate an API into our own code through YouTube and online tutorials, which taught us the important skills of reading others code and figuring out how to combine different tools. As a team, we’ve learned to work together and plan efficiently by knowing when to cut certain tasks off when we must move on, communicating when we need help or want support from each other.

What's next for Seedlings

For the speech to text, we plan to implement a feature where the user is allowed to save and export the transcripts as PDF’s or other file forms. Further, we plan to add more customizability to the auto formatter so that it formats in a way that is catered towards the student’s preferences. For our formatter, we also hope to enable automatic text formatting on a document on the extension without the user needing to copy specific text. We also aim to add a graphing feature that allows students to easily create graphs by plotting points and selecting graph types, then dragging and dropping these images into their notes.

Built With

• css
• gemini
• html
• javascript
• react
• webspeechapi