Inspiration
Exam season. Nobody has their notes. WhatsApp threads buried under memes, expired Drive links, and the same message sent fifty times — “can someone send Unit 3?” EZ Notes was built to end that. we had a bigger idea — what if students could not just find their notes, but actually study with them using AI? NotebookLM felt like magic, but it was disconnected from where students already stored their material. We wanted that same experience, built directly into the notes platform they already used.
How we built it
We made the EZ Notes codebase untouched and added four self-contained modules on top. Google Sign-In was wired in using the GSI SDK. The Event Calendar was built from scratch in vanilla JS with no dependencies. The AI Studio fetches selected notes from Google Drive, uploads them to Gemini via the Files API, and uses those file references as grounded context for every chat message. Quick Make sends structured prompts to Gemini and renders the JSON response as an interactive quiz, a formatted summary, or a visual mind map drawn in SVG. Everything runs client-side. No backend. No database. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages.
Challenges we ran into
Getting Google Drive files to load client-side without hitting CORS walls was the first real obstacle. Rendering a mind map without pulling in a heavy library meant writing a basic SVG tree layout from scratch — simple in theory, tedious in practice. The hardest challenge was prompt design — making Gemini ignore everything it knows and answer strictly from uploaded notes, while still returning structured JSON reliable enough to parse and render every time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we 4th sem students can help our fellow peers and other students if we deploy for the whole EPCET
What we learned
Building this taught us how the Gemini Files API works for document grounding, how to implement Google Sign-In with zero backend using the GSI SDK, and how far vanilla JavaScript can go before you actually need a framework. We also learned that good prompt engineering is half the product — getting the AI to stay within the notes and return clean, parseable JSON took more iteration than the UI itself.
What's next for EZ NOTES
EZ Notes started as a solution for one department, one frustration, and one college. But the foundation we have built is ready to scale into something much bigger.
Right now EZ Notes supports the IoT department. The next step is opening the platform to every department at EPCET — AIML, AIDS, CSE, ECE, Mechanical, Civil, and beyond. The structure is already built for it. Adding a new department is as simple as adding a new semester and subject tree to the existing database. No new infrastructure. No new code architecture. Just organized content.
The vision is simple — every EPCET student, every department, every semester, all in one place. A first-year AIDS student and a final-year IoT student both opening the same app, finding exactly what they need within seconds. No more scattered drives, no more department-specific groups, no more hunting.
One unified calendar for all of EPCET — exam schedules, submission deadlines, fests, and holidays — visible to every student the moment they open the app. No more missed deadlines because the announcement got buried in a group chat.
EZ Notes has the potential to become the default academic companion for every EPCET student — the one app they open when they need notes, when they need to revise, when they need to know what’s due next. A complete, lightweight, AI-powered ecosystem built by students, for students, and grown department by department until the whole college is inside it.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.