Talkstorm

Inspiration

As high school friends reuniting for Cal Hacks, we spent Friday catching up with each other, talking about our college experiences. When we got to studying and midterms we discussed AI productivity tools, wishing we had some sort of tool to bounce essay ideas off of and create visual mindmaps – Talkstorm was born.

What it does

Imagine if you were writing an essay and you could bounce ideas off of an AI powered mind map creator in real time as it mapped out all of your ideas. Or if you were in a business meeting and you could make live visuals while presenting. Talkstorm brings that into reality — taking your vocal input and processing it live into neatly generated mindmaps, bringing the power of visualization to your fingertips. It also provides AI summaries and live transcripts to track your thought process.

How we built it

Talkstorm utilizes Groq, Mind Elixir, and in-browser speech recognition to power a brainstorming assistant web-app. We record the user's voice live and use AI to transcribe, summarize, and analyze the recordings. Then, we use Groq to generate a heap-like mind map where the most relevant terms move towards the middle, which is visualized with Mind Elixir.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating UI with Mind Elixir. On other computer, Mind Elixir was not installed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of actually completing a viable project for our very first hackathon. Other than that, we are also proud of creating something that we all want to use, with some of us going from no coding experience to building out an entire web-app with AI integration.

What we learned

I personally learned that it’s hard to fall asleep at 3am after three cans of Monster Energy. We learned that hackathons can also be a very wholesome experience, despite the grind-y nature of hacking. We had a lot of fun going on spontaneous adventures around San Francisco which created unique experiences and core memories for all of us.

What's next for Talkstorm

We want to make brainstorming with friends or teammates easier — live collaboration, saved sessions you can revisit anytime, and smarter maps that actually get what you’re trying to say. We’re also working on speeding things up and bringing Talkstorm to mobile so ideas can flow anywhere.