Bean | Devpost

Inspiration: Mamba Mentality

Kobe Bean Bryant once said, "I’m reflective only in the sense that I learn to move forward. I reflect with a purpose."Despite being one of the most successful NBA players of all time, Kobe Bryant always strived to improve on his talents. Inspired by his desire to be better, we look to help our users be better. At the tip of the user's fingers, information that might answer any unclear topics is presented, making the learning process more efficient.

What it does: Teaching Effectively and Easily

Bean is a video recording app at its core, and focuses on self improvement. While the conference is going on, the video and audio records every second. After the conference has been completed, Bean saves the transcript and processes it. It notices key words and generates helpful links on the topic: Wikipedia pages, Youtube links, news articles, you name it. It notices word frequencies, to help yourself pick up on your bad habits of repeating words, helping yourself become a better presenter and interviewee. With Bean, you don't need others to help yourself become a better and stronger person.

How we built it

Bean was built using Python, React JS, MongoDB, and Twilio API. We first began looking at Twilio APIs as they were advertised early during the Hackathon. From then on, we began to build a MongoDB for login purposes. At the same time we had a UI team working on the login page, room page, video recording screen, and documents page. The other team was working on back-end, connecting the Twilio API to our UIs, as well as routing the webpages together. This was a very ambitious project for our team as none of us had experience with web development before, let alone Twilio APIs. Once we got our front-end and back-end connected, our UI team worked on audio/text processing.

Challenges we ran into

Having little to no experience with JavaScript, React JS, CSS, or HTML, a large part of our time was spent learning how the language and syntax worked. Our group even dealt with non-technical challenges as one of our teammates was gone for 16 hours, participating at a ping pong tournament for UCI. The Twilio API that we used wasn't as forgiving as we hoped it to be either.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Considering none of us had any experience working with an industry level API and Web Dev, we are proud of the product we completed. We came across many challenges, and we are happy to even be presenting as we didn't think we would have a product ready by the end of the Hackathon.

What we learned

We learned a lot about UI development, trying to making our UI as simple and clean as possible. We also learned about routing using React, connecting webpages on our domain together, as well as Twilio's Video API. We learned about a login system that requires a database, and a room system that users can enter based on their username. But most importantly, we learned that teamwork is the best way to accomplish a goal that seems so far fetched.

What's next for Bean2

What's next for Bean2? Bean2 will be more polished than Bean1, as we already have plans to allow users to join together in the same room, communicating with each other through video, as well as creating a transcript that has timestamps and usernames, which would be great for meetings.