Brevify: Video Summarizer

Don’t have time to watch the whole video? Brevify can create a text summary of your video, so you can get the information easily and efficiently. Learn key information & concepts instantly!

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Inspiration

Videos on YouTube are getting longer and longer over time - back then, youtubers get straight to the point but now they feel a need to have long intros, outros, and ad breaks, which keep the viewer from getting the information they want. In addition, as our lives are getting busier and busier in this modern, technological world, we simply don’t have the time to watch a full YouTube video for homework or for studying to understand the material.

As Machine Learning enthusiasts, we wanted to find and use an AI or ML model to help solve this problem.

Audience, Impact, Applications

Our audience involves both student learners (K-12 and college) and adult learners, as they can turn teacher lectures and educational videos into shortened text summary notes to study from. We also have use cases for hearing impaired learners, as they can easily sift through information generated through our text transcriptions, and for court case recordings, as recorded court videos can be transformed into legal documents for legal purposes.

What it does

Brevify is a web app that ensures that all users, including students and adult learners alike, can always have a platform to enhance their learning by summarizing video content in a quick and convenient way. The user can upload a video file of their choosing, and AI algorithms will then transcribe and summarize it into easily digestible sections. Brevify can be used at any time, every day.

Brevify has 3 pages: the home page/demo page, about page, and contact page. The Home page is where the user can try out our video summarizer. The About page describes the motivation behind us creating Brevify, contains a data flow diagram, and gives instructions on how to use Brevify, which is very simple. The Contact page is there in case users have questions/suggestions and we have also included our email and social media icons in case users want to follow our updates.

Brevify has two main functionalities: extracting the full video transcription and extracting short chapter summaries, which can be used to find specific concepts and/or retrieve the main points. After a user chooses a video of any length and format (such as .mp4) to upload to the Brevify site, their video only takes up to a minute or two to be processed and for summaries/transcriptions to be generated, making it efficient.

How we built it

In total, Brevify uses two main types of softwares- AI and web development. Brevify was made with a node js backend and html frontend. In order to make the website look clean, we used Tailwind CSS for the first time in conjunction with JQuery for manipulating the DOM. In order to connect all the APIs, we used Axios and express. The audio model and language model used were both supplied by AssemblyAI.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenges involved technical issues and errors. The main challenge we ran into was environment setup, since Replit kept crashing when we tried to implement Tailwind CSS for animations, style, and formatting. We also ran into some errors with uploading files and sending them between the frontend and backend. Making the APIs run smoothly from front to end was also a major hassle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since many of us are specialized in a few technologies and completely new to others, (ex nodejs, Ajax, and tailwind css) we are proud of the fact that our website turned out clean and easy to use despite the challenges, as we learned these languages quickly through documentation and collaboration. We are also proud of how well the transcription and summary functions work.

What we learned

We learned how to use specialized web development frameworks, such as Tailwind CSS and node.js. We also learned how to better utilize APIs through JQuery and Axios. We also gained insight as to how Natural Language Processing and audio processing machine learning models work.

Benefits of Brevify

Benefits of Brevify as a technological tool/solution: it is easy to use, free, and fast. In addition, it is reproducible and sustainable in the long term as it is easy to set up (you only need to have an IDE and the source code for our project, which is provided in the github) and is a permanent website on the internet.

What's next for Brevify

Currently users can only upload their own videos, so we plan to allow the website to connect directly to YouTube video links. From what we know, Brevify is one of the first ever free web app-based video summarizers, meaning that it is not only convenient to use for a general audience (Brevify only requires internet connection and a device to run- no special purchases or tech skills are needed) but also has potential to thrive in the education technology sector. We also plan to partner with schools, especially K-12 schools and universities around the nation, in order to spread and promote the enhancement of convenient video learning using our solution. In the end, we hope Brevify becomes a real-world product on the market for edtech tools for learners of all ages around the world.

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