Inspiration
Many professors often use different platforms to host their course which makes organizing your schedule a painstaking process. At the same time, manually inputting your schedules into Google Calendar is an almost unreasonable process. So we need a system that allows us to keep track of our schedules without requiring a massive amount of effort.
What it does
The tool works by pushing information gathered from syllabi into organized Google calendars.
How we built it
Backend: Python and Flask the basic framework, we also used Google Calendar API to add events to the calendar, as well as Gemini API for NLP and event parsing, and ICS export (icalendar used to send ics to Google Calendar API)
Frontend: The main user interface is currently an HTML page, which uses: JavaScript , Google Identity Services for OAuth (client-side sign-in and API calls) Modern HTML/CSS for UI (no React or Tailwind in the current codebase)
Challenges we ran into
Calendar Titling. Internet latency, which in turn delayed api calls, making the whole testing process very slow. Long wait times for the parser. The events/tasks on the Google Calendar would often have issues with the dates.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Since the wait time was kind of annoying, we developed a built-in flappy bird game that allows you to play as the parser processes the syllabi information. Additionally, we added a Dark Mode feature since the white-and-blue theme was a bit hard to look at throughout the night.
What we learned
How to set up APIs, how to effectively use git.
What's next for Earlybird
We've noticed whenever an AI agent is embedded in a program (specifically for the projects we've seen here), the wait times are usually a bit longer than expected. We think that Earlybird can expand to an extension that allows one to play a short game while any program loads. On the actual product side, we also want to create an extension that automatically detects if there is a syllabus/work schedule on your webpage. You would then simply click on the extension to automatically update your Google Calendar.
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