EduAssistant

Inspiration

Boring Lectures, Studies, Books.. Some words from which every teenager tries to run away. And when it comes to colleges, we know better what the real situation is ! So, we wanted to make Education fun by making a chat bot that provides you answers, but with a wink ;)

Also, we decided to tackle a critical problem of lack of knowledge about the interests of our audience.

And lastly, we took up a problem that is widely spread but highly ignored, the practice of jotting down lecture notes. (BETA)

What it does

1 The chat bot gives answers to your questions. Well, that's what all chat bots do, don't they ? So, what's new with ours ? It's the fact that it doesn't always give answers, sometimes, it's in a lousy mood just like the teenagers and likes to talk about GFs... What ?! No ! I mean Global Fiascos (like Global Warming).

2 Suppose, you want to give a workshop, but don't know which topics will the students be interested in ? So, what do you do ? Simple, you open EduAssistant App and get a ordered list of topics in which the students are most interested in !

3 In this era of automation, do we really need to WRITE down lecture notes ?! I think not, so we designed this automatic notes taker system.

How we built it

1 Building this chat bot was a deep one ! The chat bot gives a variety of answers, major thanks to the amazing APIs used-

HP HavenOn Demand - Machine Learning API to extract the topics given in user query.
Wikipedia (Simple Explanation API) - To provide short definitions.
Google YouTube API - To show video results in chat bot.
Pandora Bots API - To get those witty answers, now you know the secret !

2 Getting topic stats involved fetching all Github Repos of the user and reading their Readme to detect the most common topics. For this we used Github Rest API.

3 Everything that the professor speaks is converted to text using Google Speech-to-Text API and is saved in a file on his phone, which can later be shared with students.

and finally, the APIs are hosted on Heroku Server.

Challenges we ran into

1 Designing a chat bot which provides correct answers along with being witty was a tough task, and having no prior experience of working with chat bots, it became tougher.

2 We designed a chat bot UI for the first time where we faced a deadly bug (yeah, it was really deadly for our app) but thanks to Arnav and Prateek Sir, it was squashed !

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1 Designing a chat bot which doesn't bore you with his answers.

2 Developing a system to find the common interest of any class.

What we learned

Learning about the working of chat bots really interested us and we're sure that we'll try building another better one soon.

What's next for EduAssistant

Loads ! For one thing, the chat bot isn't perfect as of now and needs some _ education _ himself ;) We plan to fetch data from more sources to get more accurate results about the interest of audience. We plan to integrate a summary API to summarize the lecture notes. And lastly, who knows if you find EduAssistant trending on Play Store in few weeks ;)