Lecture Studio

Inspiration

The Americans with Disabilities Act Title II has a compliance deadline of April 24, 2026. This means every public university in the United States is legally required to make their digital content accessible to all students by that date. Most schools are scrambling to figure out what that even means in practice. We saw this deadline coming and asked a simple question: what does an accessible lecture actually look like in 2026?

What it does

Lecture Studio lets professors record their lecture and clone their own voice. Students can then ask questions about the lecture by speaking or using sign language and hear the professor's actual voice answer them back, powered by AI.

How we built it

We built a web app with two sides, one for professors and one for students. The professor side uses ElevenLabs to transcribe audio and clone their voice. The student side uses Google's Gemini Live AI to understand questions in real time and streams the answers through ElevenLabs so it sounds like the professor speaking. We used MediaPipe to detect hand signs from the webcam for ASL input.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the professor's cloned voice to speak Gemini's responses in real time was the hardest part. Gemini Live normally outputs audio in its own voice, so we had to make Gemini output text instead and pipe that text into ElevenLabs simultaneously, while also handling interruptions when a student talks over the response.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We ran Gemma 4 fully locally on device. After the lecture ends, Gemma 4 reads the transcription and every timestamped annotation the professor drew on the slides and builds a structured Lecture Memory from it. This means the AI knows not just what the professor said but what they were pointing at and when.

What we learned

Real time audio pipelines are unforgiving. Timing, buffering, and interruption handling all have to be exactly right or the whole experience breaks.

What's next for Lecture Studio

Separate professor and student portals, a persistent lecture library, support for multiple languages, and mobile apps so students can access lectures anywhere.

Built With

• axios
• css
• elevenlabs
• gemini
• javascript
• jsx
• node.js
• ollama
• pdfjs-dist
• react
• vite