Note Float

Inspiration

Every morning, you wake up for another day of Math. Its 8 AM and we are tired and we are too exhausted to scribble away as the professor rapidly writes on the board. On top of that, we can barely see because we forgot our glasses in our tired state. Our team experiences this every day, and we were determined to solve this problem!

What it does

Note Float allows you to take a picture of the classroom board. After that, it will convert all the words in the picture into a file that you can edit. Additionally, it will analyze the key words in the file and create a word map of the most important information on the board. This way, you can understand what the topics, key points, and frequent discussions were going on that day in class. This gives room for those who are struggling to stay awake to still understand big concepts.

How we built it

First we built an app that uses Microsoft's Text Recognition API to translate a picture that you have on your phone, or one that you take with your camera, into words on a text file. Next, we integrated that segment of the app that sends this textile over to the Text Analytics API to be analyzed for key words. The request gives you the key words of your text file

Challenges we ran into

We were initially trying to use another API but it was yielding null results. We did not give up, instead we switched to Microsoft's Cognitive Services API. Additionally, we had many issues relating to calling the Text Analytics API because the library used an endpoint that was for the East Coast but our subscription key was for the west coast. It took a long time to understand where this issue was stemming from and subsequently change our subscription key.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that we were able to successfully integrate two different Microsoft Cognitive Services API's in a unique way that would leave the user with more capabilities.

What we learned

We learned that many times APIs have small glitches and getting past them requires thorough investigations into each small segment. We also learned that though we were progressing slow, we were able to get so much done because we never gave up!

What's next for Note Float

We want note float to be able to take the file it has analyzed for key words and sort the file into folders based on those key words. This will allow students to easily organize their notes in class with just a few clicks of a button! Additionally, we want to enable the app to have data persistence, which we could not get to with our time limit.