EZNote

Inspiration

I was having a discussion with some friends about note taking in the classroom and during zoom meetings and realized that despite the rapid innovation of technology, we still resort to taking notes by hand and manually typing or writing everything out, which got me wondering what I could do to automate this process. Obviously there is no substitute for your own personalized style, but I wanted to see if it was possible to turn something as simple as an audio recording into a nicely formatted document which summarizes the recording.

What it does

EZNote revolutionizes the way note taking is done by allowing a user to submit an audio recording, which could be of a lecture, a meeting or even a tutorial video, and then uses the power of AI to transform that audio recording into text, which is then formatted into a markdown style document and sent back to the user as a PDF file to be downloaded and viewed whenever needed.

How we built it

EZNote was made using nodejs, express, and OpenAI. Express is used as the webserver framework, which provides the end user an interface to submit their audio recordings to OpenAI. This project does require an OpenAI API key, which can be retrieved on the OpenAI API website.

Challenges we ran into

During the development of EZNote, one of the challenges was successfully using the OpenAI API to submit audio recordings. This was largely because at first the project utilized regular web requests to access the API, which resulted in some issues with uploading the file correctly. It was later discovered that OpenAI provides an official node.js package, which solved this issue.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a working front end for the service, which greatly increases accessibility of the product as opposed to having a standalone command line tool, which may hinder those who are not well versed in technology from using the project.

Providing a service with real world application and utility. This project isn't just an experiment, but actually has real world use cases and would definitely allow people such as employees and students to be more efficient in their day to day operations.

What we learned

We learned the importance of researching existing projects/libraries during development, as had this been done at the beginning, a lot of time would have been saved trying to fix the issue that was faced. Another thing that was learned during the development of this project is the importance of being organized and having a step by step plan when developing, as this removes uncertainty about what the next step is during development.

What's next for EZNote

EZNote could benefit greatly from additional features, some of which include, prompt customization to allow the user to have more control over the format which the summary is delivered in as well as style customization to allow the user to configure how the document should look. One more thing that EZNote would benefit from is user interface improvements, specifically adding an indicator to the submission page which shows the user that their audio file is being processed and displays the progress of the submission.

Built With

• chatgpt
• express.js
• node.js
• openai
• whisper