BLUF

BLUF uses AI to remove the hassle of having to listen to minutes of irrelevant information when trying to learn topics on YouTube and gives you the ability of asking specific questions about the video

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Inspiration

Everyone in our group, be it because of ADHD or other factors, can relate to the scenario where you struggle to watch a YouTube video because of how long it is, even though the information you're looking for is simple and can be answered quickly.

What it does

BLUF, Bottom Line - Up Front, is a program that removes a significant amount of wasted time when you're trying to learn a topic on YouTube. BLUF generates a neatly formatted article that summarizes the key points of the video, with a "table of contents"-like timestamp list in case you want to cut to the chase.

How we built it

We used React for the frontend, and Flask for the backend. All four of us collaborated by dividing the work, while some worked on the frontend, others worked on the backend and testing. We first started by creating a plan of essential features we must implement, followed by nice to have features we'd implement if we had time.

Challenges we ran into

Time was a major setback here. We only had 24 hours to write a full stack application completely from scratch, and some of our team members haven't had on-hand experience in the real world yet. So the more experienced also had to spend a major amount of time helping those who weren't too confident in their abilities. We also faced challenges when trying to divide the work as cleanly as possible, so that we didn't have to have to spend time merging code from two different contributions in our Version Control System.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're incredibly proud that we were able to finish such a powerful, clean, and fluid application in such a short amount of time and given our manpower. We're also proud that everyone came out of this having had learnt many important things that will help us in the long-term. For some, this was their first on-hand experience in making a product that other people might actually use, and we're proud to have been able to make something as great as BLUF available for use today.

What we learned

We learned how maximize our teamwork as much as possible, using Version Control Systems to collaborate on code collectively. We also learned many good programming practices that will help us in future projects.

What's next for BLUF

We definitely plan to put this out into the real world. We have many more ideas for this, including being able to ask the chat bot about specific timestamps in the video, and substantially decreasing the processing time for each request, possibly by using a Natural Language Processing to simplify the requests.

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