DuckView: Interview Prep, a project by PoncyDucks

webapp screenshot

Inspiration

As we are all students deep into the recruiting process, we have all had our fair share interviews. We know that preparing for an interview can be a nerve-racking experience, so we wanted to give people an easy way to improve their speaking skills when answering interview questions.

What it does

On our website, a user can generate an interview question and begin to answer it. The answer will be recorded, transcribed, and displayed for the user. Afterward, the answer is analyzed and we show the user their most common filler words, most used words, and their sentiment. The user can then review the data in order to adapt their interview skills to increase their confidence and speaking ability.

How to use the webapp: _ press start, speak clearly, wait until your words appear, press stop _

How we built it

For the front end, we are using a combination of HTML/CSS/Javascript to interact with the user and provide the necessary functions for the interview practice.

In the backend, our Javascript functions work with the Azure Speech SDK to provide speech-to-text functionality, and the Azure Sentiment Analysis API to review word-choice and sentence positivity. We are hosting our website with Microsoft's Azure web services as well.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to add user accounts to the website, but we had to spend more time focusing on implementing the interview process than we thought. Also, the visual component of our website is sufficient for demoing, but we definitely want to expand upon it in order to provide an impressive experience to any user that visits our website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team, we are very proud that we integrated so many technologies in order to produce something we would want to use ourselves. The integration required a lot of communication between all of our team members to provide quality functionality and a good user experience.

What we learned

This hackathon exposed many of our team members to extensive work with API's. We had to quickly learn how to apply documentation from many different sources. Also, this was our team's first time creating a webapp for the hackathon, so we had to learn a lot about providing a sensible experience to anyone who visits our website.

What's next for DuckView

For our website, we have plans to add many useful features that will greatly extend the functionality of DuckView. These features will include the ability to upload your resume, where we will then generate questions based off the resume's content and check if the user properly talks about said content. Also, DuckView would be a fantastic way to connect with employers, so we plan to add features that allow companies to generate their own questions and provide application opportunities to users. These features would of course require the implementation of the previously mentioned user accounts. Overall, this project has definitely inspired us to continue adding more features to the website to create a very useful tool for people like us looking to develop their careers.