Enhanced Notes

Image of notes with markings
The end result
Enhanced Notes logo

Inspiration

The online environment has been challenging for us all. Staying organized and keeping track of notes has been uniquely difficult in an online environment, which is compounded by the fact that it is difficult to represent math formulas, chemistry equations, and the like on text.

What it does

Converts pictures of notes to text, and looks up sections of text enclosed with a slash on Wikipedia. This application works on any browser, mobile or not. A powerful tool to enhance your note taking, allowing you to store notes digitally and look up confusing terms all at once. Enhanced Notes is the future of note taking for students worldwide.

How we built it

Split team members into front and back end, did research on different programs that could be useful. We finally decided on using Google OCR and calling the Wikipedia API mainly. Each part of the pipeline was built independently and then integrated with each other. The final pipeline uses OCR algorithms to convert images into plain text and then parse for slashes to query the Wikipedia API. The result is a text copy of what is in the passage, with bracketed parts to indicate the results of the wikipedia query.

Challenges we ran into

We had issues with android app development and ran into difficulties with material design and XML. We also spend a while figuring out how to insert an image into a machine learning model.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to coordinate four members who have never worked together before and had zero coding experience on a limited timeframe, finally making a concrete product. We were also able to get complex API calls working with a variety of sites. We used deep learning + Convolutional Neural Networks for our optical character recognition pipeline.

What we learned

Difficulties of Android app development, React Native development. Google Cloud Engine. Don't bite more than you can chew, we learned to have better time estimates on how long or difficult something will be. Machine learning. Be prepared to sacrifice your sleep schedule.

What's next for Enhanced Notes

A feature to export to OneNote and many many other file formats. Support for image lookup and insertion (we are almost done with this). Full featured web dashboard with history. Interactive notes